Raabe and the Orchester first came to Hanover four years ago, and the response was raucous, according to Hopkins Center Programming Director Margaret Lawrence.
"This was a case where people were completely enthralled," Lawrence said. "They had never seen anything like this show, and they immediately began campaigning to find out when they could see this artist again."
The Palast Orchester's current tour is in promotion of their new album, "One Cannot Kiss Alone," a new version of their most successful album "Kussen kann man nicht alleine," according to the Hopkins Center program notes.
The group's performances pay homage to early 20th-century German songs, but the band performs them in a tongue-in-cheek manner that fills them with black humor and double entendres. The humor is augmented by Raabe's eccentric performance style, dry humor and heavy German accent, which all give him a voice akin to a male Greta Garbo. The Orchester's presentation and music also set a mood that transports the audience back to this nostalgic age.
"They are completely debonair," Lawrence said. "They transport you to this moment of time in the Weimar Republic when you can imagine people in night clubs wearing diamonds and wearing very sophisticated clothes, and yet they have a sense of humor about what they're doing."
Raabe echoed a similar sentiment toward his music and performance philosophy in a video that appears on his agent's website.
"I don't like the word nostalgia' because I think this music is timeless, and this humor, this bittersweet humor is timeless," Raabe said in the promotional video. "It's nice to misbehave in a tuxedo."
Despite the Orchester's somewhat stylistically dated musical selections, the band attracts a cult following of all ages. Raabe was even invited to sing at the wedding of punk rocker Marilyn Manson, according to Lawrence.
In addition to the standards of 1930s German dance hall music, however, Raabe and the Orchester perform classics from the Great American Songbook such as "Cheek to Cheek" by Irving Berlin and "I Got Rhythm" by the Gershwin Brothers. The Orchester also covers modern pop songs like Britney Spears' "Oops!...I Did It Again" and Salt-n-Pepa's "Let's Talk About Sex."
Based on the audience's reaction the last time Raabe and the Orchester were here, there seem to be no worries that the audience will not enjoy the show.
"The craze for his music really kind of defies all age boundaries," Lawrence said. "Some older audience members came to it with a sense of actually understanding the history of what was going on then, and then younger people just somehow knew that here was an artist who had YouTube coverage of taking different pop songs and mashing them in as if they were songs from the '30s in Berlin."
Raabe was born in Germany and attended the University of the Arts in Berlin with hopes of becoming an opera singer, according to the group's official website. When he was younger, he developed an interest in German dance music in Germany's pre-war Weimar Republic, the website said. Many pre-war composers fell off the grid in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Raabe said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
"Gone, killed by the system," Raabe said in the interview. "So this repertoire also represent the problems and politics of the day."
While at the University of the Arts, he found that his voice suited the music he had fallen in love with as a child, The Journal reported. He found a group of friends that shared his enthusiasm for the cabaret tunes and in 1986, he and 11 other students formed the Palast Orchester, which translates to Palace Orchestra in English.
The group's first performance was in the foyer of the 1987 Berlin Theaterball, according to The Journal. The show went so well that the crowd abandoned the main attraction to watch the Orchester play, and since then, Raabe and his group have performed around the world putting on about a 100 shows a year, The Journal reported.
Raabe and the Palast Orchester perform tonight at 7 p.m. in Spaulding Auditorium. A post-performance discussion will follow the show.
Raabe could not be reached for comment by press time.
