From March 13 to 22, The Club at La MaMa E.T.C. will present the U.S. premiere of "Tonight: Lola Blau," written and composed by Georg Kreisler, English version by Don White, directed by Dick Top (Holland), featuring Anna Krämer (Germany) as Lola. This U.S. premiere is an opportunity for NY audiences to savor one of Europe's "big little" musicals and its unforgettable holocaust themes. The piece depicts a rising, charismatic, Dietrich-style cabaret singer who is forced to flee Austria because of her Jewish heritage, taking refuge in the U.S. She makes do with "survival jobs" on Tin Pan Alley until her sensational return to her homeland after the war, when she discovers that nothing much has changed.
The show was actually written in 1971 by Georg Kreisler, a virtuoso composer, satirist, pianist and musical wit whose songs include "Please Shoot Your Husband," "My Psychoanalyst Is an Idiot," "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," and "Two Old Aunts Dance the Tango." Many of his songs are just as popular with today's generation as they were 50 years ago when he first wrote them. His other plays include "Der Tote Play" (1974), "Aufstand der Schmetterlinge, Der 2000" and "Adam Schaf hat Angst" (2002). His books include "Wenn ihr Lachen wollt" (When You Want To Laugh), "Ernste Bedenken - Lieder zu Zeit" and "Ist Wien Überflussig" (Is Vienna Superfluous?). Critics have characterized "Tonight: Lola Blau" as a brilliant tour de force for any actress who can bring it off.
The musical was first performed in the Kleines Theater der Josefstadt in Vienna and ended after a run of 175 sold-out performances. Its early success was later repeated in Berlin, Hamburg and Israel. It continues to fascinate European audiences with its ruthless view of the Holocaust and its legacy on subsequent generations. It has been widely produced, but never before in the U.S. It was adapted into English in 1993 by Don White, an English translator and advertising man, who had co-founded Opera Rara in 1970 and subsequently won laurels for his translations of Donizetti's "Le Convenienze Teatrali," Poniatowski's "Au Travers du Mur" and Offenbach's "Robinson Crusoe," among others. His version of "Robinson Crusoe" was acclaimed by Rodney Milnes in Opera Magazine as "setting new standards in the translation of comic opera." White's English adaptation has been performed in England and Ireland.
The musical opens with Lola Blau as a Jewish singer trying to find work in Nazi-occupied Vienna. Escaping to the United States, she is obliged to sing in seedy nightclubs before achieving fame. After the war, she returns, with some trepidation, to Vienna. Her story is told in a nearly continuous flow of Kurt Weill-style numbers, each cleverly evoking a mood, a period or environment in wickedly accurate parody and pastiche. There are about twenty chansons, during which are projected historical images like Hitler on pedistals, splattered 'Juden' signs and body-litterEd Battlefields. In Lola's return concert, she slyly condemns all those who failed to notice the disappearance of six million Jews and confronts the audience with its prejudices. She dares the audience to share Kreisler's disgust at Austria's posing as a victim of Nazism rather than as a collaborator.
Lola's pride at having survived--and her guilt at having left Europe--are neatly and poignantly captured in the play, which juxtaposes images of war with snippets of contemporaneous American culture, like "The Good Ship Lollypop" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo." Her return to Vienna turns the city inside out, with brilliant songs about collaborators ("Frau Schmidt), the entrenched plutocrat impresarios ("Herr Director") and a sardonic sendup of "Thank God for Hollywood" sung to Mozart's Piano Sonata in C major.
Kreisler's story actually eclipses Lola's (he admits that everything he does is somewhat autobiographical). He was born in Austria in 1922 and took refuge in the U.S. during WWII, struggling to establish himself among such Jewish expatriates as Arnold Schönberg and Friedrich Holländer. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, working in anti-Nazi intelligence and as a translator at the Nuremberg trials. Although he returned to Europe in 1955, Kreisler has retained his American citizenship. His dark humor and uncompromising criticism of society and politics have caused him many difficulties, including appearance prohibitions in radio and television. Now in his eighties, he lives in Basel with his wife, cabaret artist Barbara Peters.
