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New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Ute Lemper Still Sings Songs of Rebellion. The Stakes Are Still High.
'Welcome to Weimar — to the year 2025,' Ute Lemper announced. The German-born singer and actress was greeting friends and colleagues who had squeezed into the Birdsong Society's small headquarters by Gramercy Park to hear her perform songs from her latest album, which celebrates Kurt Weill, a composer Lemper has championed for four decades. Sliding into the album's title number, 'Pirate Jenny,' Lemper got even closer to a listener who had been standing just a few feet away, fixing him with a snarling grin. Featured in 'The Threepenny Opera,' the most celebrated of Weill's noted collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, the tune has been covered by artists from Nina Simone to Judy Collins. It's also the only standard written from the perspective of a hotel maid waiting for a ship of pirates to arrive and, at her behest, murder all the guests. 'It's a song about revolution and rebellion,' Lemper explained in an interview before the event. The singer is less intimidating in conversation than she is when channeling bloodlust. She'll turn 62 in July, and with her long, lean frame and impossibly high cheekbones, she still projects the cool beauty of a runway model. Lemper was perceived as something of a rebel herself, at least in her native country, when Decca Records released 'Ute Lemper Sings Kurt Weill' in 1988. The album, which evolved from 'a little fringe record I made in Berlin' a couple of years earlier, earned Lemper an international fan base — with one notable exception. 'The Germans hated it,' Lemper recalled. 'They weren't interested in speaking about the past.' Decca's chief executive at the time, Roland Kommerell, German himself, had started a project dedicated to bringing back music that had been banned under the Nazis, including classical symphonies and Weimar-era cabaret songs — music composed by Jews who were persecuted or, like Weill, forced into exile. 'It was a huge chapter to rip open; it was still bleeding at the time,' Lemper said. 'And suddenly, I was in the position to have to respond to hundreds of journalists about this music. I became almost the representative of my generation, the Cold War generation, in Germany.' Lemper lived for a while in Paris and in London, where she starred in the Brecht- and Weill-inspired musicals of John Kander and Fred Ebb, winning an Olivier Award for her portrayal of the merry murderess Velma Kelly in 'Chicago,' a role she also played on Broadway. Since 1998 she has called New York home; she currently resides on the Upper West Side with her second husband, the musician Todd Turkisher. Turkisher played percussion on 'Pirate Jenny,' which also features 'Mack the Knife,' 'My Ship,' 'Speak Low' and 'Surabaya Johnny.' Co-produced by David Chesky, Turkisher's frequent collaborator, and Lemper, the tracks wrap her pungent, dramatically astute vocals — applied through the years to the words and music of artists as diverse as Jacques Brel, Philip Glass, Nick Cave and the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda — in Chesky's atmospheric, often eerie arrangements. The album sprang from a conversation Lemper had last year with Chesky, who released it on his label, the Audiophile Society. Lemper pointed out to Chesky, also a composer, that 2025 would be the 125th anniversary of Weill's birth. 'And he said, 'you should do something different. Let's make it more accessible for a new generation, with a groovy component, but without watering down the strength of the stories.'' In an email exchange, Chesky wrote, 'Ute owns this genre of Weill material; she understands the world of Brecht and Weill better than anyone I have ever encountered. But I proposed to her, what if we took these classic songs and set them in this dark, late-night, Berlin cabaret vibe, while using the electronic language of today's music? Then you have versions that still honor the songs but have a more direct connection to today's world.' Adrienne Haan, another German-born, New York-based singer who has won acclaim performing a range of international material, including Weill's songs, was a teenager when she first discovered Lemper. In a phone interview, Haan, 47, said she had been influenced by many artists who recorded from the 1920s through the '50s, 'but Ute was much closer to my age, and she was such a strong interpreter. There was a certain steel in her voice, and I found it fascinating that someone from Germany, from the generation above me, could make it in America.' A prolific live performer, Lemper will trace Weill's life and songbook on May 27 and 29 at the Manhattan cabaret venue 54 Below. The engagement follows one earlier this month at Neue Gallerie, where she presented another favorite program, 'Rendezvous With Marlene,' based on a three-hour phone conversation she had in the late 1980s with another German woman known for denouncing Hitler: Marlene Dietrich. Lemper had written Dietrich, then in her late 80s, 'to apologize' for comparisons that had been drawn between them, 'and to thank her for the inspiration she had given to generations of women,' she said. 'Marlene was a woman ahead of her time; she raised the gender question 100 years ago — she was bisexual, she dressed like a man,' she added. 'And she became an American citizen and fought against the Nazis, entertaining troops on the front lines. She wanted to go home later, but the Germans thought she was a traitor.' Attentive to history's darker recurrences as well as its nuances, Lemper is wary of certain comparisons that have been made involving President Trump. 'There is only one Hitler,' she said, but called the current moment a 'new chapter,' that is 'really worrisome' in no uncertain terms. Lemper has also been interested in expressing herself more through songwriting. In 2023 she released 'Time Traveler,' consisting entirely of original material, as well as a memoir in German with the same title, 'Die Zeitreisende' — featuring an epilogue by her daughter, Stella, who just earned her master's degree in creative writing at Columbia University. 'I had already published a memoir when I was 30,' Lemper mused. 'An East German publisher asked me to write it, because so much had already happened with my career, and living through the fall of the Wall.' She hopes the new book, which has been translated into Italian, can also be made available in English: 'I incorporated tales from those times, and obviously followed that up with more decades of life and motherhood and ups and downs. I so appreciate aging. I would never want to turn the wheel back — except maybe for a little less backache, and a new hip.' Lemper is considering a replacement, but only when she can find time in her schedule — which this spring alone has also included a German revival of a staging of Brecht and Weill's 'The Seven Deadly Sins,' which she first performed in more than three decades ago. 'We're going to take it to Paris next year, and then London,' she said. 'I still have more to give, and I have to give it at every performance. The more you give, the more you have.'
The Guardian
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mother Courage and her Children review – wartime profiteering rarely sounded so good
The noise is constant. It is in the eight marimbas lined up across the stage, which add a South African bounce to Bertolt Brecht's 1939 epic of the thirty years' war. It is in the operatic songs, all lush harmonies and pulsing percussion. And it is in the vocal effects of the large cast, adding birdsong or insect rhythms to the battlefields. Sometimes it is in the crackle of a plastic bottle to suggest fire, the shuddering boom of a drum to indicate an execution, or the grind of hands across metal for machine-gun fire. All of it is generated by the actors, much like the set, by the ensemble with Janet Brown and Eve Booth: a resourceful collection of corrugated iron, wooden pallets, old tyres and buckets. It gives Mark Dornford-May's production an in-built theatricality: each performance created anew. But suddenly the noise stops and the silence is piercing. The moment comes when Paulina Malefane's no-nonsense Mother Courage faces her greatest threat. With heavy irony, it is not the conscription of her first son (Brodie Daniel), the execution of the second (Joseph Hammal), nor even the rape and mutilation of her daughter (Noluthando Boqwana-Page). All those she regards as the cost of doing business; collateral damage in the pursuit of profit as she buys and sells from the back of her cart to the highest military bidder. No, what sucks the air out of her is the outbreak of peace. No war, no trade, no noise. The respite is temporary, of course. Neither war nor capitalism can rest for long. But the icy silence is a highlight of a gutsy production, filleted down to an economical 90 minutes by playwright Lee Hall, who translated the play for Shared Experience in 2000, and marking the welcome debut of Ensemble '84, a company drawn from the environs of Horden, a former mining village in County Durham overlooking the North Sea. In collaboration with Johannesburg's Isango Ensemble, the actors are forthright and physical, building a sense of community not just in the makeup of the newly formed company but in the implication that war, like money, draws every one of us helplessly in. At Horden Methodist Church until 24 May
The Guardian
16-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Brecht's answer to Beckett's question
The question posed by Andy Beckett (What if one key problem with British politics at the moment is us – the voters?, 16 May) was answered with sharp irony by Bertolt Brecht in his poem Die Lösung (The Solution): 'Would it not in that case / Be simpler for the government / To dissolve the people / And elect another?'Derrick CameronStoke-on-Trent Thames Water's chair, Sir Adrian Montague, argues for bonuses up to 50% of senior managers' salaries, because they are its 'most precious resource' (Report, 15 May). Some of us would say that water is their most precious resource, and should not be in the hands of rule-breaking, profit-seeking TreagusManchester Thames Water's executives want Ofwat to refrain from fining the company for its failings (Nils Pratley on finance, 13, May). Perhaps instead, the overpaid executives themselves should be issued with massive fines for their failings? It might just concentrate their minds a bit GreenIpswich Our football-mad German step-grandson, aged seven, came to stay recently, travelling in one of his many souvenir shirts, a West Ham one. 'Is someone forcing you to wear that?' asked the border official (Letters, 13 April).Karen AdlerNottingham Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
New York Times
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Most Divisive Restaurant in London Is Open Only for Lunch
The Yellow Bittern, an 18-seat restaurant and bookstore near King's Cross station, hardly looks like the most divisive lunch spot in London. It feels more like the farmhouse of a retired professor: Customers ring a bell to enter, then hang their coats on pegs by the door, while pots of Irish stew simmer in the tiny open kitchen. The food is hearty and hot, served with open jars of mustard. The décor includes books on Bertolt Brecht and an accordion. But the cooking and ambience are not the only reasons that London's top restaurant critics, chefs and gourmands have come to dine and opine. Many are curious for a taste of the controversy swirling around its head cook, Hugh Corcoran, a deeply read communist and vocal Instagrammer who managed to enrage half the city soon after the Yellow Bittern opened in October. 'I've arrived at dinner parties or meals with people and then we all say, 'Shall we discuss the Yellow Bittern?'' said Margot Henderson, the chef of Rochelle Canteen in East London and a pioneer of modern British cooking. 'It's the talk of the town.' Much of that talk boils down to issues of class, as it so often does in Britain. The Bittern is cash-only and open for two seatings, at noon and 2 p.m., only during the workweek. Detractors have noted that few Londoners can partake in a leisurely, multicourse midday meal with a bottle of wine, and fewer still can justify one that easily costs $300 for a group of four. And the suggestion that they could — coming from a man with a larger-than-life drawing of Vladimir Lenin in his restaurant — has set off a yowl of irritation. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Yahoo
25-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Edelweiss Pirates, Zazous, and Swing Kids: How Youth Subcultures Resisted the Nazis During World War II
Universal'In the dark times / will there also be singing? / Yes, there will also be singing. / About the dark times.' –Bertolt Brecht When people imagine life under an authoritarian government, they probably don't picture expressions of joyful nonconformity. The government itself would certainly prefer they do not — fascism, in particular, typically disdains individualism. In his essay 'The Doctrine of Fascism,' Benito Mussolini wrote that the ideology 'stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State.' This was especially true when it came to young people living under the Nazi regime. The Hitler Youth had existed since 1926, before the Nazis came to power, but in 1939 membership for children ages 10 to 18 was made mandatory by law. While the organization was first and foremost intended to indoctrinate the nation's young people into the Nazis' fascist, antisemitic ideology, it also furthered the image of a totally unified society. But there was a major fly in the ointment of this plan: Multiple youth subcultures weren't willing to go along with that project and had their own ideas about self-expression. Some of the most distinctive of those movements emerged not from Germany but France, under the German occupation and collaborationist Vichy government of Philippe Pétain. The so-called Zazous proliferated on Paris's iconic Champs-Élysées, where they smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and partied to swing jazz. Male Zazous wore oversize jackets and long hair that they slicked back, while the girls wore broad-shouldered jackets, bright red lipstick, and curls or braids they let hang down. The style was partly in imitation of the wide, high-waisted 'zoot suit' popular in the US among figures like the flamboyant bandleader Cab Calloway, whose song 'Zaz Zuh Zaz' is believed to have inspired the group's name. That style, however, was also a deliberate, practical middle-finger to the Nazis and the collaborationist regime. To contribute to the war effort, citizens of occupied France were expected to conserve cloth and cut their hair to be made into slippers. Thus, to be a Zazou wasn't just to defy the state's idea of who a good French young person should be, it was to actively deprive the state of raw materials. The Zazous 'opposed the regime by ignoring it, which was a political act whether they knew it or not,' the American musician and jazz critic Mike Zwerin wrote in his book Swing Under the Nazis. 'Wearing long jackets with wide collars and plenty of pleats is a political provocation during a highly publicized campaign for sartorial austerity.' After the Nazi occupation mandated that all Jewish people in occupied France wear the yellow Star of David, a number of sympathetic gentiles donned their own stars with alternate messages, such as 'Goy,' 'Buddhist,' and naturally, 'Zazou.' Isabella Segalovich, who writes and produces videos on history for Hyperallergic, tells Teen Vogue, 'One of the things that totalitarianism does, and fascism does, is the totalitarian leaders want everyday people to feel alone and helpless, and putting something on your body to show you are not happy with the state of things is something everybody else can see. And even if they're not in that place to do that, they can feel more strength so they can keep going on.' Segalovich compares the Zazous' wearing badges to non-Palestinians who have taken up the traditional keffiyeh cloth in solidarity during the war in Gaza. Across the Rhine River, a similar subculture had developed in Germany: the Swingjugend, or Swing Kids. Like the Zazous, they loved swing jazz and had distinctive style, derived from American and British fashions. This included checked sport coats, homburg hats, and shoulder-length hair for the boys, and 'overflowing' hair with lacquered nails and penciled eyebrows for the girls. While the Nazis aggressively discouraged deviation from the norm — and from German culture in general — jazz was particularly infuriating to them. The genre's association with Black and Jewish composers led the regime to refer to jazz as 'degenerate art,' embodied in an infamous illustration that depicted a racist caricature of a Black musician with a Star of David on his lapel. Even more dangerous, from the Nazi perspective, the Swing Kids deliberately mocked the Hitler Youth, the national emblem of proper German boyhood. The lyrics to one popular Swing Kid song taunted their 'crew cuts and big ears,' and the Kids jokingly greeted each other with 'Swing Heil.' The conservative press saw the cosmopolitanism and swagger of these movements as a threat, with French media accusing the Zazous of acting like American teenagers. 'We are having great difficulty in eliminating the venom of Americanism,' the Vichy newspaper La Gerbe wrote in 1942. 'It has entered our customs, impregnated our civilisation.' In other words, a regime organized on the basis of strict hierarchies — itself the puppet of a regime organized on racial supremacy — couldn't thrive if its youth wanted to be more like the kids in a multiracial democracy, even one with its own problems. A third subculture was less urbane and fashion-forward than the Zazous or the Swing Kids and had more in common with hippies or crust punks. The Edelweiss Pirates, named after a flower many members wore as a badge, were an even more pointed rebuke of the Hitler Youth. In addition to the group's opposing ideology, it also countered the structure of the Hitler Youth by being a loosely organized group of largely working-class kids who wore colorful, outdoorsy clothing and engaged in activities like camping and hiking, which were outside the Hitler Youth's strict regimentation. Significantly, the Pirates comprised girls and boys, while the Nazis consigned girls to the Hitler Youth's female auxiliary, the League of German Girls, to remind them of their duty to the state and the family unit. These groups may have started out being opposed to the Nazis largely for aesthetic reasons, but as time went on, some of them transitioned to more active opposition to the Nazi state. Some members of the Edelweiss Pirates engaged in resistance tactics like aiding fugitive Jewish people and deserters from the German army. The fist of the state frequently came down on these subversive cultural movements. The Zazous became the subject of a moral panic in the Vichy-controlled press, which led to frequent beatings on the street and a campaign by the French fascist youth group Jeunesse Populaire Française to forcibly cut the hair of Zazou members. The Swing Kids were repressed even more brutally, with many of their members sent to youth detention camps or, in the case of legal adults and/or Jews, concentration camps. The Nazis hanged 13 young adults without trial in Cologne in 1944, among them Edelweiss Pirates, in a place that is marked by a commemorative mural today. One of the Pirates killed, Barthel Schink, was recognized by Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. He was hanged weeks before his 17th birthday. In a time when concerns are now running high about authoritarianism in much of the western world, these groups offer a historical lesson that joy is an act of resistance, however small, because it deprives authoritarians of the unified consensus they covet. 'We don't see any literal effects of art most of the time and in that exact moment," Segalovich tells Teen Vogue. "But often these things are unseen. I have no doubt that it makes a very large difference in how we can sort of hold on to our humanity and our community during these times.' Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue Want to read more Teen Vogue history coverage? 6 of the Most Famous Cults in U.S. History This Deadly Georgia Lake Holds Secrets About U.S. History Helen Keller's Legacy Has Been Sanitized Why We're Still So Obsessed With the Salem Witch Trials
