The show, which has toured nationally over the past two years, recently received rave reviews at the Chicago Fringe Festival. The Seattle Times has called Silver “the Michael Feinstein of Weimar Republic pop.”
Silver doesn’t just sing the songs. He researches the period, placing his audience within the historical context. In the case of Hollaender and Weill, two highly successful figures on the German cultural scene who were forced to flee the Nazi regime, the show has great significance for Jews.
“It’s Weimar 101, but you don’t know you’re learning,” the 26-year-old performer joked last week by phone from Los Angeles.
“In any kind of archival music, there is a responsibility for the performer to educate the audience,” he added.
“It’s a visceral experience, sure, but it’s the intellectual context that places it in history. I’m trying to make this music totally accessible and this is the way to do it.”
In Weimar Germany, cabaret “was mostly a Jewish art form,” he continued. “But there are so many misconceptions. Even some Jewish organizations who want to book me think Weill and Hollaender were Nazi composers.”
Actually both men were Jews, but totally assimilated Jews, like so many Berliners of the time.
Silver tells the story of how Weill attended a Brown Shirt rally one night, just to check it out, and found his own name being read off a list of “cultural undesirables.”
He went home, grabbed his wife, fled across the border to France and eventually settled in the United States.
Hollaender’s escape was far more dramatic, but Silver reserves the telling of that tale for the stage.
Sure, everybody knows the works of Weill: “Threepenny Opera,” “Knickerbocker Holiday,” “Lost in the Stars,” but who’s heard of Hollaender?
Think Marlene Dietrich. Think “Falling in Love Again.” Think the man who, according to Silver, put German cabaret on the American map, particularly through the film “The Blue Angel.”
Hollaender was nominated for an Academy Award four times. Nevertheless, he never felt at home in Hollywood, Silver said, and, unlike Weill — who put everything German behind him when he settled here — Hollaender returned to Berlin after the war.
The Dietrich imprint on this music, no less than that of Weill’s widow, Lotte Lenya, has been hard to escape. But Silver brings a fresh approach.
He also reminds us that both women were in their 20s when they first performed this material.
“There is this complete misconception that you have to be old and wrinkled to do this music,” he said.
“But I meet Germans who say, `Oh, you do German cabaret better than the Germans do.’ And that’s because I’m not all caught up in the way it’s supposed to look.
“I’m a nice Jewish boy from Beverly Hills and I’m young and I wear hip clothes on stage. There’s no artifice, no costumes, no special effects — just me.”
It almost didn’t happen that way. Although he always sang, Silver was classically trained as an actor at both UCLA and London’s Royal Academy. He was working with a Motown artist who was grooming him for a career in R&B when he picked up a Ute Lemper album of Weill cabaret songs and fell in love.
He has recorded the Weill-Hollaender songs and is workshopping a new show, “Cafe Society,” to which he brings his historical approach to the songs of Cole Porter, Marc Blitzstein and Noel Coward. He also coaches other performers and will teach a master class at Speakeasy while in the Bay Area.
He is not, however, above learning a thing or two himself.
“One of the most interesting aspects of doing this was for me to get in touch with the Jewish side of myself,” Silver said. “It’s like I started singing it and I got it, in some unexplained way.
“Weimar was this glorious period between wars, very liberal, very enlightened. The Jews were totally assimilated. So, imagine being Kurt Weill, and that successful, and you kind of get a sense of why so many stayed,” he said.
“This music goes way beyond music. It’s history; it’s survival.”