Heute Abend: Lola Blau

It rings. With the lascivious, snooty voice of a great diva, chamber singer Carmen Fuggiss yawns into the earpiece of the stage telephone, brought to life live by pianist Hyerim Byun: "Lola Blau?" - the beginning of an intense evening in which we immerse ourselves in the narrated and portrayed life of a fictional woman who is not so fictional at all. In large parts, the successful work Heute Abend: Lola Blau, written by the great Viennese cabaret song composer and singer Georg Kreisler, resembles Kreisler's own life story. Kreisler had hopes of a successful musical career in the German-speaking cultural sphere, but had to leave Austria, which had become part of the German Reich, due to his Jewish ancestry, ended up in the USA, finally in the US military - and even back in Germany as an interpreter in the course of war crimes trials after 1945. The fate of the young Jewish woman Lola Blau, who was actually preparing to work as an actress at the Landestheater Linz, is similarly tragic and crazy at the same time. But then she has to flee Austria. Lola travels to the USA, takes the "Liab im Taschl drin" with her and learns the sometimes bitter-tasting lessons of life in the years that follow.
The twenty songs by Kreisler in particular characterize this evening, during which the laughter usually gets stuck somewhere in various parts of the throat, at the latest when wounds are mercilessly opened in Kreisler's chansons. Has anti-Semitism really disappeared with the end of the Shoah? Is there really hope for a good life? And how does it feel to return to a homeland where you never felt at home?