After dismissing his work as merely decorative, a fierce Italian offers an aspiring young painter stern advice: “You must be a monster,” he braces. “Or a machine.”
The painter, Tamara de Lempicka, never took the advice in real life because it was never given. But “Lempika,” the new Broadway musical about her, which opened Sunday at the Longacre Theatre, certainly did, and then some. It is a demon And A machine.
A machine because it is, with streamlined efficiency, in his brilliant portraits of the 1920s and 30s, Lempika changed the representation of women in art forever, and thus women changed themselves. The exhibition suggests that the volumetric flesh, aerodynamic curves and bombshell breasts of Jazz Age Paris are today’s template for Glamazonian feminism.
For a “monster”, efficiency is not always pretty. Sensitivity, complexity and historical accuracy are among the values compromised in the grinding of musical gears. Yes, that fierce Italian existed; He was Filippo Marinetti, founder of Futurism, and later Fascist. But the scene with Lempicka studying art was created like no other.
Does that matter in music that admits to being “inspired” by life, not faithful to it? Are there perhaps more values in drama than truth?
Because yes, another reason why the show is a “monster” is that it’s a big song with great belting by several excellent practitioners of the craft. As Lempika, Eden Espinosa rouses her way through nearly a dozen songs by Matt Gould (music) and Carson Kretzer (lyrics). He has excellent company in Amber Iman as Lempika’s lover Raffaella and Beth Leavell as the dying baroness who sits for a portrait. For good measure, Natalie Joy Johnson, as cabaret star Suzy Solidar, contributes a barnburner to announce the opening of her lesbian hangout. Naturally the song is called “Women” – and the fact that the music is about them gives them pride of place, which is a nice change.
But if there’s no denying the realism of the vocals, and Rachel Chavkin’s smooth performance on Ricardo Hernandez’s deconstructed Art Deco sets, the story (by Kreitzer and Gould) is incredible in the wrong sense of the word. It’s not just Marinetti (George Abud, excellent) so strangely central, or a composite of Rafaela, or in real life Solidor Nazi collaborator and Lempicka Baroness traitor, her portrait. (Lempika begins her affair with the baron, played by Nathaniel Stampley, years before she becomes a widow.) The condensation, regurgitation, and flat-out fudging of the plot creates a contextual blur that obscures the main character.
If you look far enough away, you’ll at least get the correct outline. The show’s Lempicka, like the real one, was born in Poland and married Tadesz Lempicki (Andrew Samonski) in St. Petersburg in 1916. The Russian Revolution sent him and his daughter (Joe Glick) packing for Paris, where Lempika resumed painting to pay the rent. Soon she collected lovers and patrons of both sexes, including Baron, who in 1933 would become her second husband. In 1939, with Germany threatening France, the couple – both Jewish – fled to the United States; We last saw Lempika washed up in Los Angeles in 1975.
It was a great life, filled the frame like her subjects. But the idiosyncratic tenderness characterized by the paintings — “never let them see your brushstrokes,” he says — is not a successful stage technique. Often history gets airbrushed here, inviting the same criticism that Marinetti lobbed at Lempica: fancy. Chavkin beautifully depicts the Russian Revolution and then the advance of fascism across Europe, with huge flags, shouted slogans, salutes and goose-stepping choreography (by King Feather Kelly) and flashing red lights (by Bradley King) to an anemic “Les Miz” that borders on camp. Paris demimonde’s louche crosses that border, as substantial as the sequins.
The artistic process is well handled. In a trenchant scene, Lempika, who is poor in Paris, is so hungry that she eats the pastries she has been painting. But rather than validating her romantic gluttony, the musical is overeager to palatize her unconventionality. “I’ve had the great fortune to love not once, but twice,” she says early on. “And there was the great misfortune of loving both at the same time.”
There is little if any historical truth in that characterization that is ultimately not at issue. The painter Georges Seurat in “Sunday in the Park with George” – a performance mentioned in the first lines of the script – is mostly fictional, a cad and generally unlikable to his mistress. “Lempicka” lacks the courage to make its title character a modern woman, or to allow her to be fierce and great, especially in mis-pronounced, often obscure lyrics. Maybe she’d be more of a demon if it was less of a machine.
Lempika
at the Longacre Theater in Manhattan; lempickmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.