Theatre in Review: Lempicka (Longacre Theatre)

	Eden Espinosa. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

The new musical Lempicka reveals its kooky intentions right at the top: Eden Espinosa -- currently, the hardest-working woman in show business -- enters as the elderly Tamara de Lempicka, once a notorious artist and now a weary survivor of Paris' between-the-wars social and bohemian melee. We are in sunny Southern California, circa 1975, but she is encased in a coat so bulky she could pitch it like a tent and use it as a residence. A California cold snap? Nope, just a theatrical device; after a few bitter comments about being old and forgotten, off comes the outerwear and there is the young Tamara, svelte, glamorous, and ready to storm the world. The scrim behind her turns translucent, revealing the company standing on Riccardo Hernández's multilevel set. There are bursts of light -- the set teems with LED tape -- flashes of video and bursts of...electronic dance music.

Well, why not? We've already had a disco musical about Imelda Marcos. And there's something about the artist's lusty, champagne-fueled life that arguably cries out for such treatment. But Lempicka, which sweeps its heroine through revolutions, wars, rapes, betrayals, and steamy bisexual triangles, keeps trying on different styles like a shopper on a spree. Introduced as the blushing bride of Tadeusz, a Polish aristocrat -- although she has to be practically dragged away from her easel to get married -- her plushly upholstered existed is undone by the Russian revolution in a sequence that sends the show into full, flag-waving Les Misérables mode. Cue the red stage wash and projections of riots while the chorus chants it is "our time" and Tamara trades jewels and, later, her body, to rescue Tadeusz from Bolshevik clutches.

If you're expecting more stentorian ballads, think again: It's off to Paris, where we might as well be in Gigi the way everyone is singing about la vie and l'amour as random chorus members roam the boulevards, breaking into unmotivated dance combinations. Tadeusz, stunned at the loss of his estates, refuses to look for a job, so Tamara labors as a charwoman. But her artistic impulse returns when she spots a painter working out of doors, dressed in a smock and sporting a beret; he's one ooh-la-la away from being a perfect cliché, but he's enough to light Tamara's creative fire.

The April-in-Paris mood quickly fades when Tamara falls under the influence of Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti, famed apostle of futurism, who, as played by George Abud, goes full Brecht and Weill, glaring at the audience and sneering at the bourgeoisie. Under his guidance, Tamara's portraits, which combine a sleek deco glamour with a chilly machine-age detachment, make her the toast of Paris. Running around in the demimonde, Tamara falls hard for Rafaela, a streetwalker equipped with a duchess' hauteur. Discovering that life is a cabaret, the ladies hit the lesbian bar scene, carrying on while ignoring the growing Fascist threat.

Underneath this wild inconsistency lurks a plodding earnestness, however. By all accounts, the real-life Lempicka was a gadabout, a clotheshorse, and a sexual predator, notching conquests on both sides of the gender binary while making money hand over fist. But Carson Kreitzer's and Matt Gould's book turns her into a bore, a workaholic who is clueless about the selfish behavior that maddens her husband and lover. Cranky and oblivious, she tucks away her loved ones in carefully sealed compartments. That she fails to compel is nothing against Espinosa, who sings, sings, sings, with full-throated conviction all night long. But a wildly colorful character has been reduced to a black-and-white sketch.

Because Tamara is such a grind, Espinosa often gets upstaged by her supporting cast, beginning with rangy, sultry, husky-voiced Amber Iman as Rafaela, whose insistently free-and-easy ways make Tamara look like a calculating, middle-class hausfrau. Iman has the score's standout number, the seductive "The Most Beautiful Bracelet," but she makes all of her material sound better than it is. As the baroness who becomes Tamara's patron, Beth Leavel makes something out of very little. It's a bit of a shock to see the award-winning actress, who, only a few years ago, starred (in this very theatre) in The Prom, playing third fiddle and being made the butt of an astonishingly tasteless "beaver" joke. (Young theatre hopefuls, beware -- this could happen to you!). The lady is a pro, however, confidently stopping the show with an eleven o'clock number, "Just This Way" that sums up how the baroness' moneyed, privileged way of life is ending in dissolution and imminent death. In good times or bad, Leavel is a pleasure to have around and Lempicka gets a major lift whenever she turns up.

Otherwise, Abud sneers effectively, although the show could do more to explain Marinetti's second-act embrace of Fascism; Andrew Samonsky labors honorably in the thankless role of stuffy Tadeusz; and, as lesbian club proprietor Suzy Solidor, Natalie Joy Johnson handles the book's plentiful supply of vaginal humor. ("And to think...you're all here for my....opening.")

The score features acres of recitative, Kreitzer's repetitive lyrics offering banal pronouncements about art and "the new woman." Gould's music gestures toward melody without ever getting there, even when gift-wrapped in Cian McCarthy's attractive orchestrations. The show gains interest late in the second act when the Nazis are on the march and Tamara's carefully triangulated personal life unravels spectacularly but, too much of the time, a woman who, in real life, must have been a real handful is flattened into a dutiful icon of female achievement, suitable for framing.

At first glance, I thought that Hernández's multilevel represented the lower levels of the Eiffel Tower, until another drop came in, representing the lower levels of the Eiffel Tower. In any case, it works well enough, especially the panels that creep in, providing a surface for Peter Nigrini's evocative projections of Moscow riots, French street scenes, and the Reichstag fire, as well as selections from Lempicka's oeuvre. With their big beam looks and rapid-fire chases, Bradley King's lighting adds some much-needed drama to the proceedings. The sound design by Peter Hylenski and Justin Stasiw is admirably clear. Paloma Young's costumes combine meticulous period creations with bizarre chorus outfits seemingly lifted from an old television variety special; among her more bizarre notions is a set of metallic bodices for male and female chorus members who stagger around robotically, singing the praises of the machine age. (During this number, I felt I had been mysteriously transported to the Eurovision Song Contest.)

After a while, one begins to wonder what Kreitzer and Gould see in their subject. I hate to bring up a certain other musical about a famous painter but Sunday in the Park with George finds a musical language that dramatizes its protagonist's feverish drive to create, something to which Lempicka never comes close. And a life spent carousing and fleeing disaster gets boiled down to a turgid romantic triangle. The authors have set out to celebrate their transgressive heroine but all they've done is tame her. --David Barbour