Lola Blau is a Jewish singer trying to find work in Nazi-occupied Vienna. Escaping to the United States, she is obliged to sing in seedy nightclubs before achieving fame. After the war, she returns, with some trepidation, to Vienna. Her story is told in a nearly continuous flow of seventeen Kurt Weill-style songs, each cleverly evoking a mood, a period or environment in wickedly accurate parody and pastiche. In Lola's return concert, she slyly condemns all those who failed to notice the disappearance of six million Jews and confronts the audience with its prejudices. She dares the audience to share Kreisler's (the composer's) disgust at Austria's posing as a victim of Nazism rather than as a collaborator.

Lola's pride at having survived—and her guilt at having left Europe—are neatly and poignantly captured in the play, which juxtaposes the cruelty of the Shoa with snippets of contemporaneous American culture, like the old Sophie Tucker song "Mr Siegel".

The piece was written in 1971 by Georg Kreisler, a virtuoso composer, satirist, pianist and musical wit whose songs include "Please Shoot Your Husband," "My Psychoanalyst Is an Idiot," and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park". Many of his songs are just as popular with today's generation as they were 50 years ago when he first wrote them. Critics have characterized "Tonight: Lola Blau" as a brilliant tour de force for any actress who can bring it off.

Kreisler's story actually eclipses Lola's (he admits that everything he does is somewhat autobiographical). He was born in Austria in 1922 and took refuge in the U.S. during WWII, struggling to establish himself among such Jewish expatriates as Arnold Schönberg and Friedrich Holländer. He enlisted in the U.S. Army, working in anti-Nazi intelligence and as a translator at the Nuremberg trials. Although he returned to Europe in 1955, Kreisler has retained his American citizenship. His dark humor and uncompromising criticism of society and politics have caused him many difficulties, including appearance prohibitions in radio and television. 

The show's popularity on the continent is partly explained by Europe's continuing obsession with the Holocaust. British audiences have also found it marvelously illuminating. Reviewing a 1995 production at The Old Red Lion, Islington (London), critic Graham Hassell wrote in "What's On" that the piece found an "appreciative audience, who like me, discovered new and sad facts about post war anti-Semitism and denial or ignorance of the Holocaust in Austria and the UK. It is perhaps a shame that few or none of them were of the generation of young people here in the UK that is credited with knowing nothing about the Holocaust or the significance of Auschwitz. And that's despite current emphasis on Holocaust studies in schools, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the institution of National Holocaust Memorial Day."