Dismissing her work as merely decorative, a wild Italian offers harsh advice to an ambitious young painter: “You must be a monster,” he says. “Or a machine.”
The painter, Tamara de Lempicka, didn’t take the advice in real life because it was never given to her. But “Lempicka,” the new Broadway musical about her, which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theatre, certainly did and then some. It’s a monster and one machine.
A Machine Because argues, with enhanced effectiveness, that in her groundbreaking portraits of the 1920s and 30s, Lempicka forever changed the representation of women in art, and thus changed women themselves. The voluminous flesh, aerodynamic curves and warhead bosoms that so won the Paris Jazz Age have become, the show suggests, today’s model for glamazon feminism.
As for the “monster”, efficiency is not always pretty. Among the values at stake in the musical’s tool-grinding are subtlety, complexity, and historical accuracy. Yes, this wild Italian existed. it was Filippo Marinetti, the founder of futurism and later a fascist. But the scene in which Lempicka studies art with him is, like many others, made up.
Does this matter in a musical that admits to being “inspired” by life, not true to it? Are there perhaps greater values than truth at play?
Why yes, another reason the show is a “monster” is that it’s a delightfully big song, with superior belts from several excellent practitioners of the art. As Lempicka, Eden Espinosa thrillingly blows through nearly a dozen songs by Matt Gould (music) and Carson Kreitzer (lyrics). He has excellent company in Amber Iman as Lempicka’s lover Rafaela and Beth Leavel as a dying baroness sitting for a portrait. For good measure, Natalie Joy Johnson as cabaret star Susie Solidor contributes to a barn to herald the opening of her lesbian hangout. Of course the song is called “Women” — and it’s a nice change that a musical about them gives them pride.
But while there’s no doubting the realness of the vocal power and the elegance of Rachel Chavkin’s direction on Riccardo Hernández’s deconstructed Art Deco sets, the story (by Kreitzer and Gould) too often feels unbelievable in the wrong sense of the word. It’s not just that Marinetti (George Abud, excellent) is so oddly central, or that Rafaela is complex, or that in real life Solidor was a Nazi collaborator and Lempicka the baroness’ traitor, not her portraitist. (Lempicka began her affair with the baron, played by Nathaniel Stampley, years before she was widowed.) It’s that the plot’s condensation, resurgence, and flat confusion create a murky contextualization that obscures the main character.
If you look from far enough away, you’ll at least get the right outline. The show’s Lempicka, like the real one, was born in Poland and in 1916 married Tadeusz Lempicki (Andrew Samonsky) in St. Petersburg. The Russian Revolution sent them and their daughter (Zoe Glick) packing for Paris, where Lempicka continued to paint to pay the rent. She soon gathered lovers and patrons of both sexes, including the Baron, who in 1933 would become her second husband. In 1939, with Germany threatening France, the couple — both Jewish — fled to the United States. Lempicka was last seen washing up in Los Angeles in 1975.
It was a long life, filling the frame like its subjects. But the uncanny smoothness demonstrated by the paintings – “Never let them see your strokes,” he says – is not a successful stage technique. Too often the story takes the airbrush here, prompting the same criticism that Marinetti leveled at Lempicka: decorative. Chavkin depicts the Russian Revolution and later the advance of fascism across Europe very beautifully, with large flags, shouting slogans, choreography resembling salutes and goose steps (by Raja Feather Kelly) and flashing red lights (by Bradley King ) in an anemic “Les Miz.” If it borders on the camp, the pose of the Paris demi-monte crosses the border, effectively as sequins.
The artistic process is best handled. In a scene with trenches, Lempicka, poor in Paris, is so hungry that she eats the pastries she paints. But instead of capitalizing on her romantic voraciousness as well, the musical is too eager to make her unconventionality palatable. “I’ve had the great fortune to love not once, but twice,” she says early on. “And I had the great misfortune to love them both at the same time.”
That there is little or no historical truth to this characterization is ultimately not the problem. The painter Georges Seurat in “Sunday in the Park With George” – a performance mentioned in the first lines of the script – is also heavily fictionalized, a hat for his mistress and generally unlikely. “Lempicka” doesn’t have the art, especially in the ill-intentioned, often obscure lyrics, to make the title character a relatable modern woman, nor the guts to let her be awful and great. Maybe if he was less of a machine he could be more of a monster.
Lebicca
At the Longacre Theatre, Manhattan. lempickmusical.com. Performance duration: 2 hours 30 minutes.