Perhaps it’s fitting that Lempicka, the musical about painter Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980), is visually triumphant. Bravos and bravas are due any number of the creative staff members contributing to the tuner’s grandeur as well as to the 10-strong singer-dancers, all choreographed by so-busy-this-season Raja Feather Kelly, who translates to the stage the Polish-Jewish artist’s often breath-takingly sensuous (mostly) women and men.
Huzzahs to Paloma Young for the atmospheric 1920s-30s costumes worn by Lempicka’s subjects, including her daughter Kizette and Rafaela, one of her lesbian lovers. They brilliantly conjure the period’s ultra-fashionable looks. And bows to Bradley King for lighting the clothes to so they capture the illumination in Lempicka’s works, not unlike the way Vermeer’s light drapes his figures.
Cheers for Riccardo Hernández, whose set keenly reflects the Art Deco curves and angled lines that prevailed in the period when the rich-by-marriage to Baron Tadeusz Lempicki portraitist had rich Parisians eagerly commissioning her work.
[Read Sandy MacDonald’s ★★☆☆☆ review here.]
At one moment in the proceedings, Lempicka (the determined, stalwart Eden Espinosa, newly from Michael John LaChiusa’s The Gardens of Anuncia) says of her work’s purpose, “Make the flesh glow.” This is indisputably true of those mentioned above, as coordinated by director Rachel Chavkin, always reliable for a bang-up job with something along the same scale of this property. (Recall what she accomplished with the Broadway realization of Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1912.)
Chavkin easily – okay, it comes off looking easy — obtains the entrancing painterly glow but doesn’t reap anything approaching equal results with the other more central Lempicka elements: Carson Kreitzer’s lyrics (memorializing Lempicka was her concept) and the book she co-wrote with Matt Gould, who composed the music.
No, there isn’t much glow to the manuscript as they go about retelling what is known of Lempicka. Her life is far from obscure. She became a baroness three years after, at 16, meeting the baron; gave birth to Kizette; and came through the First World War after sacrificing to liberate her war-prisoner husband. She was known to have male and female lovers, to have married a second time after divorcing, and living out the rest of her life in California and Mexico, where she died. Furthermore, she pursued a 1930s career as fascist shadows lengthened and her art — as well as her renowned promiscuity — threatened to put her out of business, and worse.
Kreitzer and Gould have stuck to some of these sketchy details and have taken liberties with others, the most significant involving Lempicka’s love life. It seems as if they decided their crucial concentration should feature the artist, husband Tadeusz (Andrew Samonsky), with whom she carries on an often-distant relationship, and with Rafaela (Amber Iman), a prostitute.
Although Rafaela appears to be known to Lempicka biographers, whether she was one-third of an exclusive Tamara-Tadeusz triangle does not seem historically verified. More likely, the bookwriters decided they’d present Rafaela as a composite of the women and men with whom Lempicka dallied. They assumed the situation would constitute a believable story. They’re more trite than right. (Tadeusz’s dalliances are dealt with in a brief exchange between the defiant Tamara and him.)
Attempting to lend Lempicka a canvas broader than Lempicka’s voluptuous canvases, Kreitzer and Gould arrange a stylized look at the Russian Revolution — and its eventually sending Tamara and Tadeusz, penniless and unprepared to work for a living, to Paris. They bookend that theatrical documentation with a fascist-foreboding routine, highlighted by symbolic figure Marinetti (the hyper-active George Abud) conjuring Hitler’s rise. (Choreographer Kelly, always at the ready, has his indefatigable contingent execute gestures subtly suggesting German citizens “Heil”-ing.)
Gould’s music and Kreitzer’s lyrics don’t do much to substantiate the drama, either. The score is not short on offerings but is short on anything memorable. More frequently than not, the numbers impress as recitative hoping to be mistaken for melodic song. Unfortunately, they remain not much more than rising and falling notes eventually adding up to pompous repetition — all the while music director Charity Wicks conducts a 10-person band with gusto.
Kreitzer’s lyrics don’t improve matters. (Has she written them first, handed them to Gould, expecting him to compose strictly according to what he’s received?) There are moments throughout when characters begin songs that should expand emotion — Tadeusz’s “Wake Up” for one, Rafaela’s “The Most Beautiful Bracelet” for another. They do their bidding but only thanks to performers Samonsky and Iman.
In other words, Kreitzer, Gould and director Chavkin rely on the cast to turn second-rate material into first-rate audience-grabbers. Their success is strictly due to cast members’ bravura intoning, for which thanks especially to Zoe Glick as Kizette, Natalie Joy Johnson as lesbian-club owner Suzy Solidor, and Beth Leavel as a rich patron.
First among the magic-makers is, of course, Espinosa, one of the foremost Broadway belters of the last couple of decades. Vivifying material about an artist’s dealing with design, with color, with form — not unlike Sondheim finishing Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Grand Jatte” — Espinosa glorifies “I Will Paint Her.” With “Woman Is,” she ends the first act on a definite high note.
Towards the final curtain, Lempicka, languishing in Hollywood, drops this observation: “No one knows what will survive.” Naturally, she’s talking about her work, but she has something more far-reaching to suggest, and it certainly leaves the Lempicka purveyors with great hope about their own dubious production’s future.
Lempicka opened April 14, 2024, at the Longacre Theatre. Tickets and information: lempickamusical.com
