A woman is pictured as a machine several times in “Lempicka,” a musical about Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980), an artist whose heyday was in the 1930s, painting Art Deco-style portraits of rich and titled Europeans. Her early artistic mentor Marinetti declares (in the song “Perfection”): “This is the age of the Machine/Man now can dream of perfection,” and tells Tamara she needs to be “a monster or a machine” to succeed as an artist. Her first husband Tadeusz Lempicki asks her (right before the song “The New Woman”): “When do you sleep? You paint at your studio. You paint at home. Like an infernal machine.” When Tamara first sets eyes on Rafaela, the prostitute who becomes her model, muse and lover, Tamara has a heart-stopping moment because of Rafaela’s beauty (“I Will Paint Her”):  “she’s flesh and she’s chrome, she is steel, she is bone.” 

I don’t know how much we’re supposed to make of these references to humans as machines. It seems significant that an art dealer assessing Lempicka’s artwork decades later observes: “The women are like machines, the machines are like women,” while we see some of these machine-like oil portraits projected onto the stage and hear an auctioneer selling them for millions of dollars. 

 In any case, the show’s oft-mentioned fusion of humanity with machinery suddenly struck me as a clarifying metaphor for my mixed reaction to “Lempicka,” which opened on Broadway tonight at the Longacre. Carson Kreitzer, who conceived of the musical and co-wrote the libretto with Matt Gould, has created some artful lyrics for Gould’s music. Director Rachel Chavkin oversees some precisely calibrated moments. Naturally gifted cast members give polished performances, most notably Eden Espinosa in the title role, and especially Amber Iman as Rafaela.  But the songs and scenes ultimately add up to an almost mechanical-feeling sameness, loud and overwhelming.

Tamara’s life and times were actually always changing, full of conflict and contrast, which “Lempicka” attempts to suggest from the first song, “Unseen.” Espinosa as Tamara is an old woman sitting on a park bench in Los Angeles in 1975 (see video below):

I tangled with a world you can’t imagine
 luxury and deprivation
princes fought to light my cigarette
crawling up from nothing I created for myself
 something that the world had never seen 
I painted what a woman could be

She suddenly becomes a 19-year-old dressed in a wedding gown. It is now 1916 in Russia, and the Polish-born Tamara is marrying Tadeusz Lempicki (Andrew Samonsky) a Russian nobleman.

Soon after their ironic “happily ever after” song (“Our Time”),  Bolsheviks arrest Tadeusz, Tamara does what she must to convince the prison guards to free him; they escape with their newborn daughter to Paris as suddenly impoverished refugees (“Starting Over.”) Tadeusz is too proud to find a job, so Tamura looks for herself:

Shift manager: What are your skills? 
Tamura: I’m a very charming hostess
Shift manager: We need cleaners. Overnight shift. 

While using her scrub brushes, she notices street painters selling their artwork, recalls her long-ago interest in art, and gets ahold of her own paint brush, an easel, some paints, and three French pastries that she plans to pose for a still life, but she’s so hungry she eats them all. She wounds up using her daughter Kizette (Zoe Glick) A Baron (Nathaniel Stampley  strolling by with his wife (Beth Leavel) sees some talent in Tamura’s efforts, refers her to  Marinetti (George Abud)

Act I ends with “Woman Is,” which comes to the closest to an aesthetic and emotional explanation of her art, beginning sparely

woman is 
plane
 lines
form 

woman is 
plane
color
 light 

woman is 
speed
green
shattered 

gathering force and speed,  climaxing in Espinosa’s full-throated belts. 

(Here it is in a music video, which differs from how it’s mounted on stage)

It’s breathtaking. And if it were the only song that built to full-out belting, it would not just stand out more;  “Lempicka” would be a better musical.

There is less about art or the artistic process in “Lempicka” than in other Broadway shows about visual artists (such as the plays Red, about Mark Rothko, which marked Eddie Redmayne’s Broadway debut in 2010, and The Collaboration, about Basquiat and Warhol; and of course Sondheim’s musical “Sunday in the Park With George. about Georges Seurat and his fictional descendant.)

We do get more about her times, although it mostly feels familiar, such as Abud as Marinetti singing “Pari Will Always Be Pari” in front of news reel-like film footage that catches us up on events from 1926 to 1933, and then Marinetti, who turns out to be a fascist, presiding over the blackshirts busting up a lesbian bar called the Monocle, which was created by Tamura’s friend Suzy (Natalie Joy Johnson.)

Tamara and her second husband escape Europe for the United States in 1939 and the times largely stop then, save for a brief visit to a gallery in the 1970s, in which Paloma Young’s costume design and Leah J. Loukas’ hair design provide a drolly accurate summary of the cringeworthy aesthetics of that era, as these designers have been just as spot-on with the more glamorous looks of the earlier decades.

The freshest aspect of “Lempicka” feature Lempicka’s life, primarily with Rafaela,  in large measure because of Amber Iman, who makes the most of a couple of beautiful bluesy songs (“The Most Beautiful Bracelet” and “Stay.’)  There is also both wit and drama in  “What She Sees,” the duet between Rafaela and Tadeusz when they finally meet, during Tamara’s breakthrough showing at an International Exhibition, which she didn’t really want either of them to attend.  

Riccardo Hernandez’s set looks like the ground floor of the Eiffel Tower, with black cables and platforms and staircases. This provides a canvas Bradley King’s atmospheric lighting and Peter Nigrini projections (although not entirely unless you get seats in the center sections.) But the use of the Eiffel Tower also felt like another unintentional metaphor – an apparent effort to suggest a monumental scale, but with an old unvaried structure made of puddling iron.

Lempicka
Longacre

Update: Closing May 19
Running time: Two hours and 30 minutes, including an intermission
Tickets: $46 – $269
Book by Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould; Music by Matt Gould; Lyrics by Carson Kreitzer; Original Concept by Carson Kreitzer; Music orchestrated by Cian McCarthy; Music arranged by Remy Kurs; Musical Director: Charity Wicks;
Directed by Rachel Chavkin; Choreographed by Raja Feather Kelly
Scenic Design by Riccardo Hernández; Costume Design by Paloma Young; Lighting Design by Bradley King; Sound Design by Peter Hylenski and Justin Stasiw; Projection Design by Peter Nigrini; Hair and Wig Design by Leah J. Loukas; Make-Up Design by Kirk Cambridge-Del Pesche;
Cast: Eden Espinosa as Tamara de Lempicka, Amber Iman as Rafaela, Andrew Samonsky as Tadeusz Lempicki, George Abud as Marinetti, Natalie Joy Johnson as Suzy Solidor, Zoe Glick as Kizette, Nathaniel Stampley as the Baron, and Beth Leavel as the Baroness with Mariand Torres, Alex Aquilino, Lauren Blackman, Stephen Brower, Kyle Brown, Holli’ Conway, Abby Matsusaka, Jimin Moon, Khori Michelle Petinaud, Ximone Rose, Nicholas Ward, Veronica Fiaoni, Mary Page Nance, Julio Rey, and Michael Milkanin.
Photos by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman