A fair assessment of Adrienne Haan’s new show, Berlin, mon amour, would have to distinguish the singer from her show.  Adrienne is terrific!  The show needs re-thinking and reworking.

A statuesque, pretty and sexy blonde (she could easily be the vamp she sings about), Adrienne evidences strong acting abilities and an expressiveness that keeps her face vibrant as she plays with her audience in a way that says “We’re having fun!” Her voice is a lovely soprano that she can effortlessly lower to contralto when a song calls for it, and she effortlessly reaches and sustains her high notes. Her emotions range from intensely passionate, as in Brel’s “Amsterdam,” to quietly sensitive, as in the Yiddish song translated as “The Carob Tree.” The sheer ferocity of her “Pirate Jenny” distinguishes it from the way it is sung by many others who include it in their Weill/Brecht repertoire. “Summertime” demonstrates that Adrienne is also comfortable in a jazz mode. While her show is absolutely contemporary, she is easily able, with a madcap style of moving and wry comic expression, to conjure up the entertainment styles of the past, in German cabarets, music halls, and even vaudeville houses. Her show is fast moving and consistently entertaining.

From an artistic point of view, however, some of the very qualities that keep the show moving also reveal a lack of narrative focus. After a rendition of “Lili Marleen” that apparently brings the German section of the show (most of it) to its conclusion, the audience is literally catapulted into the world of Gershwin and Kern, and then swiftly transported to Paris. How did it get there! Adrienne wants to sing these songs and she has not yet found a way to tie them together. The structure is too loose and it would have been better if she had not insisted on the history of Germany from the Weimar period to the end of World War II as her theme.

Adrienne, who was born and lives now in Germany, has to capture in her show the world her grandparents and even great-grandparents lived through. She is perhaps too young to fully grasp herself the love-hate relationship that many Germans developed toward their homeland, a complex emotional mixture that is brilliantly expressed in the last page of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, or revealed in Marlene Dietrich’s memoirs and biographies written about her. What now inspires the “amour” except perhaps pride that however shameful that period of German history, it gave the world artistic geniuses whose work would endure to be a reminder of something good that nonetheless came out of evil. Whether the enduring artistic heritage would redeem Germany, as Mann prayed it might, is a subject of enduring controversy. Perhaps a show that addressed such ambivalence would be more unified and even more meaningful than one that speaks of “amour” but reveals horrors.

Some final suggestions.... Because Adrienne is so powerful a singer, she should perhaps think about where to reign in some of her emotions. Her encore, Brel’s beautiful song for two aging lovers, “La chanson des vieux amants,” probably calls for a little less passion and a little more sustained tenderness. The renditions of Amanda McBroom and Micheline van Hautem seem to capture feelings more appropriate to the song’s content. On the subject of Brel, although Adrienne describes by way of introduction the sordidness of Amsterdam’s ports, with their filth and degradation, the lyrics themselves supply even more powerful images, and this is one instance when the English translation would have been more effective, especially for an audience unlikely to understand French or be multi-lingual as Adrienne is. Otherwise, her delivery of the song is a compelling one.

Adrienne is back at the Bechman with Berlin,mon amour on Oct. 29 at 9:30 pm.

Barbara Leavy
Cabaret Scenes
October 11, 2010
www.cabaretscenes.org