ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
posted 09 August 2005

It is only natural that alongside the rediscovery of a whole variety of operatic work from the years leading up to 1933, the lighter side of musical entertainment should also receive its share of attention. But Mischa Spoliansky’s 1929 ‘revuestück’ Zwei Krawatten (Two Bow Ties) has never been totally forgotten, having been kept alive through the continuing fascination with Marlene Dietrich. This was one of the pieces in which she scored an early success, and it was at one of the first performances of Zwei Krawatten that she was seen by the American film director Josef von Sternberg. From that day, as they say, she never looked back.

The book was by the expressionist dramatist Georg Kaiser, though the expressionism of, say, Der Protagonist , which he wrote with Kurt Weill and was first seen in Dresden in 1926, is a long way away. This is a simple, amusing, though highly cynical, tale of class and the power of money. Jean, a waiter in a glitzy Berlin bar, is approached by a customer who is wanted by the police. To enable him to escape, for the sum of 1,000 Marks and a lottery ticket, he and Jean exchange ties (waiter’s black for gentleman’s white). Also in the bar is Mabel (Dietrich’s role), a visiting rich American, who takes a shine to Jean, now one of the boys. When he discovers that the lottery prize is a first-class ticket on a luxury liner, the two set off for New York . Meanwhile, Jean’s fiancée Trude trails along behind him, out of sight, and on the ship, while Jean and Mabel are becoming more attracted to each other, Trude is befriended by the lawyer, Bannerman, who is searching for the heiress to a fortune. Needless to say, Trude turns out to be the heiress, and Jean, having escaped from Mabel and her suffocating Aunt Robinson by exchanging ties once more, is reunited back home on the quayside in Hamburg with Trude, and discovers that she is now even richer than Mabel!

Zwei Krawatten opened at the Berliner Theatre in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district on 5 September 1929, in a lavish production with fifty dancers, the famous Berlin-based close harmony group Die Comedian Harmonists (their story has recently been made into a musical by the composer Franz Wittenbrink and is proving popular – it is also in Dortmund’s repertory), and, besides Dietrich, two other household names in the Berlin cabaret world, Hans Albers as Jean and Rosa Valetti as Mrs Robinson. For some time, it was the ‘must see’ show in Berlin , and it was filmed the next year.

It is interesting that only three days earlier on 2 September, the Weill/Elisabeth Hauptmann ‘comedy with music’ Happy End opened just up the road at the Theater am Schifferbaudamm, only to collapse ignominiously after a couple of performances. Now we see the songs from this show, which include ‘Surabaya-Johnny’ and the ‘Matrosen Tango’ as being echt twenties Berlin , and it has to be said that the Spoliansky score for Zwei Krawatten is pretty poor in comparison. The songs delight at the time, even induce a bit of foot-tapping, but walking home after the show in Dortmund I have to admit to being hard pressed to remember any of them. This is not the case with Spoliansky’s previous show, Es liegt in der Luft, written with Marcellus Schiffer (with Dietrich and Margo Lion, who sang the deliciously provocative ‘ Wenn die beste Freundin’).

The Dortmund Theatre certainly did their best for the piece. Director and designer Carl Philip von Maldeghem and Christian Floeren kept things slick and simple – just a set of white railings and a couple of lifebelts, for example, for an atmospheric evening at sea. Best was the scene on the overnight train where ticketless Trude is bailed out yet again by Bannermann – more Connex last stopping train to Littlehampton than stylish twenties USA – where the score at last makes a worthy contribution in the form of a wordless chorus of train noises by the close-harmony group. The King’s Singers would enjoy this.

The biggest problems were the thorny questions of amplification and ambience. At just over a thousand seats the Dortmund Opera House is not large, but it is spacious. Then there is the difficulty of combining voices from different backgrounds. Trude and Mabel were cast from the resident opera ensemble, Heike Susanne Saum and Marcie Ann Ley respectively, whose bright soprano voices were quite at home. Bernhard Modes as Jean was a visitor from the popular world, as his sticking-plastered microphone made clear, but the voice itself was well defined, with clear diction when allowed. One day someone will solve the problem of the voice not emanating from the person singing! My stars of the show were the resident comic baritone, Hannes Brock, as Bannermann, who had much difficulty with those American revolving doors, and Mrs Robinson from a lovely deep-voiced Cornelia Dietrich, looking for all the world like Dame Edna.

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