Lilli Marlene – A Sigh is Just a Sigh

Everyone loves the songs of World War II. It was an exciting time, and the music of the era reflects that. It's natural that people should want to capitalize on that by presenting them. Linn Maxwell's one-woman show Lilli Marlene perhaps would have been better as a straightforward concert, rather than having bookwriter Kathryn Ryan concoct a superficial story around them.

On the surface, the idea is intriguing- three college friends who studied together at the Vienna Academy of Music, now lead very different lives. Daphne is a housewife in Indiana, USA who's given up her dream of singing, Rose is a famous British music hall singer who has a man for every night of the week, and Lilli is an opera singer in Germany, dealing with the new political ideas and restrictions that begin to infest her world. This gives Maxwell the opportunity to present music of the period from England, Germany, and America. One-person shows are notoriously difficult to pull off, but if Ryan's book were not so clunky and rife with transparent artifice, it might have been a much more effective evening.

The music is lovely, if the choices are sometimes obvious- "Saturday Night is the Loneliest Night in the Week", "As Time Goes By", "They're Either too Young or Too Old", "The White Cliffs of Dover".
Some interest was generated by some more obscure numbers - Two of the Britten/Auden "Cabaret Songs" were wonderful: "Funeral Blues" and "Tell Me the Truth About Love", as was the rendition of "Weiche, Wotan" from Das Rheingold; one of the more emotional moments in the script is Lilli (previously a supporter of the Nazi party) fantasizing about singing it to Hitler himself if she should get the chance- she feels sure that his love of the music will have him see that the words "Depart, Wotan" can refer to him, and he will give up his crazy crusade. But then she doesn't get that opportunity, so...?

Lilli's journey is the most engaging, though the least attended-to in the script. Rose finally finds true love after going with every soldier in town, and then he gets killed in the war. Daphne finds new liberation singing with the USO, and then must give it up again when her husband returns.
Maxwell is an engaging performer, and her embodiment of the three women is well-realized, as she switches from one to the other with only minor costume adjustments. Her phrasing and understanding of the music is mightily impressive, though the songs don't seem to have been chosen to show off her voice to its best advantage (aside from the Wagner, which she belts to the rafters).

A short mid-show interlude of video accompanied by a recording of Maxwell singing "Lilli Marlene" is interesting, though the images seemed to have been pulled randomly from WWII stock footage with no editing.

It was a nice little show; the mainly elderly audience around me seemed to enjoy hearing the old tunes trotted out once more.

Photos by Sue Fischer - Linn Maxwell in Lilli Marlene

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