The ill-tempered Italian, who dismisses her work as mere decoration, gives the aspiring young painter some harsh advice. “You need to be a monster,” he exclaims. “Or a machine.”
Painter Tamara de Lempicka did not take the advice because it was not given in real life. But the new Broadway musical about her, “Lempicka,” which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theater, was certainly a hit, and then some.it's a monster and machine.
That's because Lempicka argues with reasonable efficiency that in her groundbreaking portraits of the 1920s and 30s, she forever changed the representation of women in art, and by extension, women themselves. The show suggests that the voluptuous voluptuousness, aerodynamic curves, and bullet-shaped chests that excited Paris in her age became the template for today's glamorous feminism.
Efficiency isn't always pretty when it comes to “monsters.” Among the values sacrificed in grinding the gears of a musical are subtlety, complexity, and historical accuracy. Yes, those fierce Italians existed. He was Filippo Marinetti, the founder of Futurism and later a fascist. However, the scene where Lempicka learns art with him is, like many others, made up.
Is that a problem in a musical that isn't true to life but admits to being “inspired” by life? Perhaps there is greater value than truth?
Because, yeah, another reason why this show is a “monster” is that it's a hilarious chorus with great belting from some of the best practitioners of the craft. As Lempicka, Eden Espinosa thrillingly performs nearly a dozen songs by Matt Gould (composer) and Carson Kreitzer (lyrics). She works wonderfully with Amber Iman, who plays Lempicka's lover Rafaela, and Beth Leavell, who plays the dying baroness who sits for her portrait. Naturally, Natalie Joy Johnson, as cabaret star Susie Solidor, donates a barn to herald the opening of a lesbian hangout. Naturally, the title of this song is “Women.” And it's a nice change to have a musical about them that makes them proud.
But even if you can't deny the reality of the vocal power and the sophistication of Rachel Chavkin's direction on a deconstructed Art Deco set by Riccardo Hernández, this story (by Kreitzer and Gould) has a lot of bad language. Too often it feels incredible in its meaning. It could be that Marinetti (George Abdo, wonderful) is oddly central, or that Rafaela is a composite, or that the real-life Solidor is a Nazi collaborator, and that the baroness's traitor Lempicka rather than the portrait painter It's not just that it was. (Lempicka began an affair with the Baron, played by Nathaniel Stampley, years before her death.) Plot condensation, readjustment, and outright subterfuge create a contextual blur that obscures the protagonist. Noda.
If you look at it from a sufficient distance, you'll at least get the correct contour. Lempicka, who appears in the show, was born in Poland, like the real person, and married Tadeusz Lempicki (Andrew Samonski) in St. Petersburg in 1916. The Russian Revolution sends them and her daughter (Zoe Glick) packing to Paris, where Lempicka begins painting to pay her rent. She soon had a growing number of lovers and patrons, both male and female, including a baron who became her second husband in 1933. In 1939, as Germany threatened France, the Jewish couple fled to the United States. The last time Lempicka was seen washing up in Los Angeles was in 1975.
It was a big life filling the frame like her subject. But the uncanny smoothness symbolized by the paintings – “never show the brush strokes,” she says – is not a successful stage technique. History is too often airbrushed here, inviting the same criticism that Marinetti leveled at Lempicka: “decoration.'' Chavkin depicts the Russian Revolution and the subsequent development of fascism across Europe with large flags, shouting slogans, choreography resembling a salute or goose step (by Rajah Feather Kelly), and flashing red lights (by Bradley King). It is very beautifully drawn, using materials such as To the anemic “Les Miz”. If it adjoins the camp, the louches posing for the Demimonde in Paris cross its boundaries and appear large, like sequins.
The artistic process is better handled. In one moving scene, a poor Lempicka becomes hungry in Paris and eats the pastry she is painting. But instead of appreciating her romantic greed, the musical is intent on pleasing her unconventional personality. “I had the great fortune of being able to love not once but twice,” she said early on. “And I had the great misfortune of loving them both at the same time.”
It ultimately doesn't matter that there is little historical truth to that characterization. The painter Georges Seurat in “George and Sunday in the Park” (a show mentioned in the first line of the script) is also largely fictionalized, at the whim of his mistress, and generally unlikable. “Lempicka” doesn't have the skill to make her title character a relatable modern woman, nor the audacity to make her terribly great, especially in the mis-accented and vague lyrics. Perhaps if it wasn't a machine, she might have become more of a monster.
lempicka
At the Longacre Theater in Manhattan. lempikamusical.com. Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes.