Fun With Intertexts: Inaugural Lulu Edition

Now that Frank Wedekind's scandalous 1906 play Frühlings Erwachen is a crummy piece of Rock theatre schtick Tony award-winning Broadway musical, it's easy to overlook what was once his most popular creation: the sexually voracious bisexual murderess Lulu. He wrote two plays detailing her ascent from poverty and multiple marriages (Erdegeist, 1895) and subsequent descent into prostitution (Die Büchse der Pandora, 1904).

The two plays were reworked into a film in 1929 by the Austrian filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst entitled Pandora's Box. The film starred Louise Brooks (pictured above). It's stunning. Check it out.

A year later, Josef von Sternberg directed Der blaue Engel, starring Marlene Dietrich. While the film is based on a novel by Heinrich Mann, it's hard not to see a bit of Lulu in Lola Lola, Dietrich's sexually alluring cabaret singer (above). And Emmanuel Rath's downfall and eventual death look an awful lot like Schön's in Lulu. The movie is much less a critique of a fossilized educational system (as was Mann's book), so much as it is a showcase for Dietrich's alluring nightclub act.

That brings us to Lili von Shtupp, the saloon singer from Mel Brook's 1974 movie, Blazing Saddles. She's played by the greatest commedienne of the years BC (before Chenoweth), the divine Madeline Kahn (pictured). In it she performs "I'm tired," a parody of Dietrich's number from The Blue Angel, "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss." I love this verse:

I've been with 1000's of men

Again and again

They sing the same tune

They start with Byron and Shelly

And jump on your belly

And bust your ballon

Aye!

But before the German femme fatale became a source of parody, she was the star of an opera by perhaps the greatest composer of the interwar years, Alban Berg. His Lulu, left unfinished at his death in 1935, was a conglomeration of Wedekind's two plays (though more faithful to them than Pabst's film version). The role of Lulu has become a staple of soprano Christine Schäfer's repertory. In the 1995 Glyndebourne production (now available on DVD), the portrait painted by Lulu's second husband is almost identical to a picture of Louise Brooks that the gay pimp gives to the Turkish John that he tries to sell Lulu to.

And there you have it. From German theatrical history to Mel Brooks and back, this has been our inaugural edition of "Fun With Intertexts!"