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Having dismissed her work as merely ornamental, a fierce Italian offers harsh recommendation to an formidable 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. But “Lempicka,” the brand new Broadway musical about her, which opened on Sunday on the Longacre Theater, actually 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 Nineteen Twenties and ’30s, Lempicka endlessly modified the illustration of girls 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, as we speak’s template for glamazonian feminism.
As for “monster,” nicely, effectivity just isn’t at all times fairly. Among the values compromised within the grinding of the musical’s gears are subtlety, complexity and historic precision. Yes, that fierce Italian existed; he was Filippo Marinetti, the founding father of Futurism, and later a fascist. But the scene wherein 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?
Because sure, one more reason the present is a “monster” is that it’s a jolly large sing, with superior belting from a number of wonderful practitioners of the craft. As Lempicka, Eden Espinosa blows thrillingly via almost a dozen songs by Matt Gould (music) and Carson Kreitzer (lyrics). She has wonderful 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 Joy Johnson, because the cabaret star Suzy Solidor, contributes a barnburner to herald the opening of her lesbian hangout. Naturally the music is known as “Women” — and it’s a pleasant change {that a} musical about them offers them satisfaction of place.
But if there’s no denying the realness of the vocal energy, and the sleekness of Rachel Chavkin’s staging on deconstructed Art Deco units by Riccardo Hernández, the story (by Kreitzer and Gould) too typically feels unimaginable within the unsuitable sense of the phrase. It’s not simply that Marinetti (George Abud, wonderful) 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.
If you look from sufficient of a distance, you at the least get the fitting 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. Soon 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 United States; we final see Lempicka washed up in Los Angeles in 1975.
It was a giant life, filling the body like her topics. But the uncanny smoothness exemplified by the work — “Never allow them to see your brushstrokes,” she says — just isn’t a profitable stage method. 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 large flags, shouted slogans, choreography resembling salutes and goose-steps (by Raja Feather Kelly) and flashing purple 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 one trenchant scene, Lempicka, impoverished in Paris, is so hungry she eats the pastries she’s portray. But as an alternative of valorizing her romantic voraciousness as nicely, the musical is overeager to make her unconventionality palatable. “I had the nice luck 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 may be little if any historic reality in that characterization just isn’t in the end the issue. The painter Georges Seurat in “Sunday within the Park With George” — a present referenced within the first traces of the script — is essentially fictionalized too, a cad to his mistress and usually unlikable. “Lempicka” doesn’t have the craft, particularly within the mis-accented, typically obscure lyrics, to make its title character a relatable fashionable girl, nor the boldness to let her be terrible and nice. Perhaps if it have been much less of a machine she might be extra of a monster.
Lempicka
At the Longacre Theater, Manhattan; lempickamusical.com. Running time: 2 hours half-hour.
