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She’s
been Velma Kelly, Sally Bowles, Grizabella
and Bombalurina, as well as Peter Pan—and
therein exist the tangled attractions of Ute
Lemper.
Perhaps best known for her renditions of the
Kurt Weill songspiel, Lemper has proven
herself equally adept singing Joni Mitchell
and Van Morrison— as well as Harold Arlen
and Lewis Allen (the nom de plume of Abel
Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher from the
Bronx, who happened to have written, in
spite of what Billie Holliday contended, Ms.
Holliday’s signature song, “Strange
Fruit”)—which is exactly the sort of
contextural historicity that Ute Lemper
offers her audience about all her material.
Slender as a sylph, Lemper took the stage on
Wednesday evening sheathed in a black gown
with plenty of back exposure, a choice she’d
made due to the number of times she imagined
she’d be turning her back to the audience—to
drink in the swellegant nocturnal Manhattan
view afforded by the wall of glass in the
Allen Room.
And then that voice… At first, smooth and
crystalline clear, a bubble of honey
encircling the room, before she brings it
down raw with snarls and purrs. Moving from
“Strange Fruit” to Frederick Hollander’s
“Want to Buy Some Illusions?,” she lays bare
life’s broken promises and inherent
compromises. Originally sung by Marlene
Dietrich in Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair,
Lemper evokes that other Teutonic
temptress—before she’s off again, with
Harold Arlen’s “I’ve Got the World on a
String,” a song with its own flood of
delusionary associations. And when she oozes
into Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny,” there’s the
masochistic torment of every wrong-headed
love affair gone awry.
Years ago, Bette Midler recorded Weill’s
wail about a besotted woman in love with a
brutal sailor—“Take that pipe out of your
mouth, Johnny!”—a song which, somehow, fit
perfectly into the soundtrack of adolescence
in the early Seventies. The time was right
for Weill then—and given humanity’s baser
instincts, it’s almost always time for Weill,
which is in keeping with Lemper’s stated
mission to insure that Weill remains a part
of the public songbook.
Similarly, Joni Mitchell’s “Last Chance
Lost” served as a metaphoric rueful
reflection upon the current state of the
world, and to hear Lemper sing both this
song and Mitchell’s “Black Crow” was to
remember, again, the manner in which those
songs were first introduced into one’s
memory bank—when in the throes of youth with
all its attendant promise and illusion. And
how much has changed since then—or has it?
Dreams are still sold on the “Black Market,”
another Hollander cautionary tale, as timely
today as it was when it was written in 1948,
and as long as there are people to buy those
dreams, there will be broken hearts—and,
fortunately, deliciously, Ute Lemper as
their gimlet-eyed interpreter.
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