Painter musical is an epic wreck

The last thing Lempicka, the mystical new musical about Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka, needs is turpentine.

Gallons.

Unfortunately, after a grand opening at the Longacre Theater on Sunday night, it’s too late for the producers to start over with a blank canvas.

So this ugly splatter that the audience is left to parse becomes a ridiculous two-and-a-half hour Eurovision production with stratospheric delusions of grandeur.

With book and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer and music by Matt Gould, this unruly show tackles lofty themes such as fascism, misogyny, homophobia, and what makes good art.

“Isn’t perfection the enemy?” A character named the Baroness (Beth Leavell) had absolutely nothing to say to me, but Filippo Marinetti (George Abdo), the founder of futurism, ). Abi values ​​sophisticated efficiency over romantic beauty. .

Perhaps so, Baroness. But in musical theater, consistency is definitely your friend. And “Lempicka” is incoherent.

Let’s start with a comically wide setting. The musical spans his 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, World War I, World War II, and finally ends with him in 1975 America. Fifty-eight years. Take that, “Evita”!

Tamara (Eden Espinosa), a wife and mother, travels from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Paris, France, where she becomes a bisexual artist best known for her unusual nude portraits of male and female lovers.

Director Rachel Chavkin’s film is set in what appears to be the set of “Starlight Express” in Peoria, so no one period or place feels any different from the other. But I started fantasizing about roller skating races.

Confusingly, the characters tend to remain frozen in time, not changing significantly from one scene or decade to the next. Tamara’s daughter Kisette (Zoe Glick) has inexplicably remained a child for almost 30 years. Perhaps the rationale is that the girl was immortalized by her mother’s painting, but that’s just a lofty idea.

Upon arriving in the city of lights, or more precisely the city of lasers, the writer gives the wooden Tamara the necessary personality by forcing a love triangle between the artist and her husband Tadeusz (Andrew Samonsky). Give and try to give heat to the arctic plot. ) and one of her subjects, Rafaela (Amber Iman).

If you think that’s a lie, it’s because Rafaela is a composite of several different Tamara partners. There are so few details about her that we never fully understand her as the person she really is. The scandalous husband vs. girlfriend showdown is cheesy. And in the end, it is said that the fictional Rafaela either died in the Holocaust or lived a long and happy life. Hey, thank you.

By the way, Espinosa and Iman have no chemistry. Forget the common criticism that the two actors aren’t in the same show. The pair aren’t even in the same room.

Gould’s score spans styles and genres. Raffaella’s street party-esque entrance number, “Don’t Bet Your Heart,” has his ’90s Disney feel, like “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” while Marinetti’s beeping “Don’t Bet Your Heart.” “Perfection” has a more powerful atmosphere. “Mr. Robot” by Styx.

The latter, sung energetically by Abdo and choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s ensemble waving their airplane arms, is catchy, but so is “Kokomo.”

Espinosa is given dull strips of ballads like “Woman Is” and struggles to find her voice. Considering that Tamara’s story took place over the course of her tumultuous 60 years, this actress and character are surprisingly unimpressive. Remikka is neither a force of nature nor a relatable dreamer. She is a talking paintbrush.

And Kreitzer’s book is not only difficult to get through, but also erratic in tone.

Indeed, “Les Misérables”, which “Lempicka” hopes to join, had both the shocking “I Dreamed A Dream” and the silly “Master of the House”.

But what about projecting video footage of Adolf Hitler on stage and then immediately having a lesbian bar owner named Susie (Natalie Joy Johnson) joke, “Nice fur, man?” That’s a big difference. I just love beavers. ”

This terrible production was directed by the talented Chavkin, who in the past has staged adventurous new musicals like Hadestown and Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 with unmistakable skill and panache. It’s hard to believe there is.

But here, her efforts are wasted on pumping up a show that has more to do with its own twisted notion of what an epic is than its characters or story.

Tamara sits on a bench in Los Angeles in 1975, trying to tell a story about a life lived in the shadow of a changing world.

And when the curtain fell on the complex “Lempicka,” Gump’s famous words went through my mind. “Broadway is like a box of chocolates.” You never know what you’re going to get.