More than a song recital: Katharine Mehrling sings Weill

I’ve been sitting in Cafe Bauer for two hours now: if you don’t want to, say it to your face. That’s why my milk doesn’t go sour – I don’t give a damn about you, my darling. Well then, not!” Erich Kästner wrote a bitter chanson there. And Kurt Weill was just the right person to compose the right music for Miss Erna Schmidt’s angry speech.

Katharine Mehrling is now slipping into the role of the abandoned woman at the Komische Oper – and Barrie Kosky is by her side. But not at the piano like in the successful song recital “Lonely House”, but as a director. Because the evening with Berlin songs by Kurt Weil, which premieres on March 26 in Behrenstraße, is larger and more scenic.

Kai Tietje has written orchestral arrangements of the songs, there is a stage design (by Klaus Grünberg) and costume creations by Victoria Behr for the diva of the evening as well as the extras who will buzz around her like moths around a light. Dancer Michael Fernandez will also be there.

“Lonely House” revolved around the plays Weill wrote while in exile in Paris and New York. The new evening with the title “…and with tomorrow you could me” jumps back to the young composer and his happy years in Berlin. In addition to songs from the “Threepenny Opera” and from “Happy End”, Katharine Mehrling will also interpret Nanna’s song, the metropolitan anthem “Berlin im Licht” – and Erna Schmidt’s reckoning with the good-for-nothing lover. By the way, it goes on like this: “You don’t have to think that I miss you. With the intercourse with me, that’s over now. I too have something of an honor: don’t show up, darling, or you’ll be kicked out!”

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