‘Take a Walk on the Weill Side’
Cottiers Theatre - 28/11/21
Taylor Wilson “Better than Lotte Lenya”!
That’s what I said to Taylor Wilson at the end of her superb show ‘Take A Walk on the Weill Side’ at Cottiers in Glasgow on Sunday night. This of course is the highest compliment you can give to a singer of Brecht/Weill songs since Lotte Lenya was Kurt Weill’s wife and the main interpreter of his work in the 1930s and 40s.Yet it is I believe not an empty compliment. Taylor has a great mezzo voice, she trained as an opera singer at the Conservatoire in Glasgow and at the Royal Northern College in Manchester and you can’t get a better training than that. She has sung all over Europe and in Scotland for Scottish Opera and at the Edinburgh International Festival, but she is a rare classically trained singer who can easily move across from opera to musical theatre and can also act superbly. She studied cabaret and musical theatre in Berlin and Hamburg and has become the finest British exponent of Brecht/Weill songs.
Cottiers in Glasgow is like Oran Mor, an old church which has been turned into an arts centre. On Sunday night the bar and the theatre was packed as it had been on the Saturday night before, and the auditorium was laid out in cabaret style with groups of 4~6 at tables. The small stage was dominated by the piano and drums, expertly played by two members of the Schadenfreude Band, namely Musical Director, Karen MacIver, and Marion Christie.
Sadly, the cellist of the Schadenfreude Band couldn’t play, but the piano and drums proved a good backing to Taylor’s superb voice. Her theatrical props were a chaise longue and a coat hanger, but that’s all Taylor needed to convince us that her character Jenny was a credible chanteuse surviving in 1930s Berlin.
Taylor came onto the stage to introduce her character wrapped in a big coat. Of course ‘Jenny’ has a special meaning in Brecht/Weill theatre, ‘Pirate Jenny’ being a central character in ‘The Threepenny Opera’. Indeed Pirate Jenny’s song was a highlight of the performance. Taylor unwrapped her coat revealing a slinky dress and launched into two of Weill’s great songs Surabaya Johnny from ‘Happy End’ and Alabama Song from ‘Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny’.
With occasional updates to Jenny’s situation and travels from Germany to the USA and a change of dress, Taylor took us on a musical journey through the great Weill songs. For me, the finest rendition was the Pirate Jenny song from ‘The Threepenny Opera’, sung by Jenny Diver, “a lowly maid at a crummy old hotel” singing of her hate and revenge upon the rich and the powerful. Taylor sang and acted it superbly and conveyed the hate in this most powerful song. Later she sang ‘September Song’ more sweetly, and after a rapturous reception she came back to end with Mack the Knife (‘Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne……), Weill’s most famous song. Many singers since Lotte Lenya have covered these songs, perhaps the best recently being Utte Lemper, but in my judgement Taylor is the finest performer of them at present and deserves to be much better known. Let’s hope this performance and this review help her achieve the fame she deserves.
