The audience may have been relatively small but obviously the hippest place on the planet to be last Saturday night was at Ute Lemper's gig in the Olympia. It was music theatre of the most breath-taking kind. In a Brechtian sense.
Lemper and her band left people looking stunned as they limped out of the theatre after the show! Perhaps they made for the nearest "whiskey bar" to cull a phrase from Lemper's positively lascivious version of Bertholt Brecht and Kurt Weil's Alabama Song. Fittingly enough she'd kicked off the evening with Solomon Song, by the same composers. But given that Ute Lemper is world renowned for her readings of such ditties by Brecht and Weil the real surprise was Lemper's tilt at more contemporary tunes. Most notably Philip Glass's Streets of Berlin and the Divine Comedy's The Case Continues, both given chillingly powerful interpretations. Better, by far, than the versions on Lemper's latest album, Punishing Kiss.
Clearly, as with the vampire she so seductively depicts in that slice of gothic humour, I Am A Vamp, Ute Lemper feeds off an audience to fire her art to ever-greater heights. Sure, at times, Lemper oversang, forcing her voice in order to highlight its staggering range rather than to express true emotion. She also gave what some might have seen as too calculated and choreographed a "performance" rather than made any attempt to connect with the audience. But the latter, at least, leads us back to the Brechtian approach to theatre. Either way, by the time Ute Lemper closed the show with a sequence of songs that included Brel's Amsterdam, Weil's September Song and, predictably perhaps, Mack The Knife she really did have the audience eating out of the palm of her sensuous hands. Or tossing us palm to palm like the knife "Mack" used and then discarded after dispatching his victims into the night. You missed the show this time? Next time, don't!