Having dismissed her work as merely ornamental, a fierce Italian offers harsh recommendation to an bold younger painter: “You should be a monster,” he brays. “Or a machine.”
The painter, Tamara de Lempicka, didn’t take the recommendation in actual life as a result of it was by no means given. However “Lempicka,” the brand new Broadway musical about her, which opened on Sunday on the Longacre Theater, definitely did, after which some. It’s a monster and a machine.
A machine as a result of it argues, with streamlined effectivity, that in her groundbreaking portraits of the Twenties and ’30s, Lempicka perpetually modified the illustration of ladies in artwork, and thus modified ladies themselves. The volumetric flesh, aerodynamic curves and warhead breasts that so titillated Jazz Age Paris turned, the present suggests, right this moment’s template for glamazonian feminism.
As for “monster,” effectively, effectivity isn’t all the time fairly. Among the many values compromised within the grinding of the musical’s gears are subtlety, complexity and historic precision. Sure, that fierce Italian existed; he was Filippo Marinetti, the founding father of Futurism, and later a fascist. However the scene during which Lempicka research artwork with him is, like many others, made up.
Does that matter in a musical that admits it’s “impressed” by life, not trustworthy to it? Are there maybe larger values than reality in play?
As a result of sure, one more reason the present is a “monster” is that it’s a jolly huge sing, with superior belting from a number of glorious practitioners of the craft. As Lempicka, Eden Espinosa blows thrillingly by practically a dozen songs by Matt Gould (music) and Carson Kreitzer (lyrics). She has glorious firm in Amber Iman as Lempicka’s lover Rafaela and Beth Leavel as a dying baroness who sits for a portrait. For good measure, Natalie Pleasure Johnson, because the cabaret star Suzy Solidor, contributes a barnburner to herald the opening of her lesbian hangout. Naturally the tune is named “Ladies” — and it’s a pleasant change {that a} musical about them offers them pleasure of place.
But when there’s no denying the realness of the vocal energy, and the sleekness of Rachel Chavkin’s staging on deconstructed Artwork Deco units by Riccardo Hernández, the story (by Kreitzer and Gould) too typically feels unbelievable within the incorrect sense of the phrase. It’s not simply that Marinetti (George Abud, glorious) is so weirdly central, or that Rafaela is a composite, or that in actual life Solidor was a Nazi collaborator and Lempicka the baroness’s betrayer, not her portraitist. (Lempicka started her affair with the baron, performed by Nathaniel Stampley, years earlier than he was widowed.) It’s that the condensing, rejiggering and flat-out fudging of the plot create a contextual blur that obscures the primary character.
When you look from sufficient of a distance, you no less than get the precise define. The present’s Lempicka, like the true one, was born in Poland, and in 1916 married Tadeusz Lempicki (Andrew Samonsky) in St. Petersburg. The Russian Revolution despatched them and their daughter (Zoe Glick) packing to Paris, the place Lempicka resumed portray to pay the hire. Quickly she collected lovers and patrons of each sexes, together with the baron, who in 1933 would develop into her second husband. In 1939, with Germany threatening France, the couple — each Jewish — fled to the US; we final see Lempicka washed up in Los Angeles in 1975.
It was an enormous life, filling the body like her topics. However the uncanny smoothness exemplified by the work — “By no means allow them to see your brushstrokes,” she says — isn’t a profitable stage approach. Too typically historical past will get the airbrush right here, inviting the identical criticism that Marinetti lobbed at Lempicka: ornamental. Chavkin depicts the Russian Revolution, and later the progress of fascism throughout Europe, too prettily, with huge flags, shouted slogans, choreography resembling salutes and goose-steps (by Raja Feather Kelly) and flashing crimson lights (by Bradley King) that add as much as an anemic “Les Miz.” If it borders on camp, the louche posing of the Paris demimonde crosses that border, substantial as sequins.
The inventive course of is dealt with higher. In a single trenchant scene, Lempicka, impoverished in Paris, is so hungry she eats the pastries she’s portray. However as an alternative of valorizing her romantic voraciousness as effectively, the musical is overeager to make her unconventionality palatable. “I had the nice success to like not as soon as, however twice,” she says early on. “And I had the nice misfortune to like them each on the identical time.”
That there’s little if any historic reality in that characterization isn’t finally the issue. The painter Georges Seurat in “Sunday within the Park With George” — a present referenced within the first traces of the script — is basically fictionalized too, a cad to his mistress and customarily unlikable. “Lempicka” doesn’t have the craft, particularly within the mis-accented, typically obscure lyrics, to make its title character a relatable trendy girl, nor the boldness to let her be terrible and nice. Maybe if it have been much less of a machine she could possibly be extra of a monster.
LempickaAt the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; lempickamusical.com. Working time: 2 hours half-hour.
