In ‘Lempicka,’ an artist with a big, messy life gets a big, messy musical

“History is a b***h,” says Tamara, played by Eden Espinosa in the new musical “Lempicka.” “But I also”.

He creators of “Lempicka”—book, lyrics and concept by Carson Kreitzer, music by Matt Gould—want their main character to be many things: feminist, sexual revolutionary, pioneering entrepreneur, tortured artist, victim and survivor, and martyr to fads in art and culture. history. . There is enough evidence in the life of the real Lempicka to justify most of those claims to some extent, but this musical wants to prove them all, absolutely, in the space of two and a half hours. The result is a fast-paced, breathless march through some of the darkest decades of European history, and a big, messy, fascinating life is processed into a play that is simply big and messy.

The musical, seen for the first time in the Williamstown Theater Festival in 2018, is framed as a flashback: an old, bitter artist alone on a park bench in Los Angeles in 1975, reflecting on her life and career, wondering, “How did I end up here?” Her work is forgotten and out of fashion, and she is exiled in a world far removed from the wit and sophistication with which she once surrounded herself.

Suddenly, the year 1916 arrives, he is young again, he is about to get married and his mother implores him to leave painting and live a dignified and respectable life. The revolution intervenes and we leave, along a road built by “Hamilton”, approaching the first of the greatest traumas. After failing to free her husband Tadeusz by offering her jewelry to the threatening Bolsheviks, she is forced to hand over her body.

The young couple flees westward, their flight plotted on a map on the stage (set design by Riccardo Hernández), which will also carry fragments of the luminous, sensual and slightly cold art deco paintings of the real Lempicka, whose work has been collected and promoted by Madonna. An attractive ensemble of dancers (choreography by Raja Feather Kelly), at times androgynous, disheveled, menacing and country, set the tone for a frenetic idyll of ambition, success and debauchery during the interwar years in Paris.

Lempicka’s art is represented on stage primarily with easels and empty frames, and the story receives the same treatment: present as shadow, not substance. The revolution that upends the lives of our main characters is cruel, but the real grievance that causes it is lightly glossed over. Decades of need, misery and political violence pass by, seen in black and white film clips. If you want to learn more about that and how it intersects with art, go see the Käthe Kollwitz from the Museum of Modern Art shows, an artist a generation older than Lempicka, who left a much greater legacy.

In “Lempicka” the story is, as they say, just one dance number after another. It summons the shocks and shakes that forge the artist’s identity and resistance, producing not a real character, but rather a ready-made hero for contemporary political tastes. Espinosa does a heroic job tying up the threads, but instead of inhabiting a character with multiple facets, must reconcile multiple characters that serve various theatrical purposes.

Lempicka has an affair with Rafaela, a freelance prostitute (superbly played and sung by Amber Iman), and his work (portraits of self-assured women and sculptural nudes) is celebrated as liberating by the LGBT regulars at the Monocle nightclub, which is It feels a lot like the Kit Kat Club from “Cabaret.”

She also gains important independence from Tadeusz, played with starched elegance by Andrew Samonsky, but when she tells him a terrible secret, the scene falls flat because their relationship has never been coherent. She follows her own path, resisting the grim modernist ideology of the futurist prophet Marinetti, described as a nasty drunk and brutal social seer by George Abud. But it is not clear whether we should admire the artist for her independence or for her pragmatic, even cynical, submission to the tastes of the elite. The show seems to credit her with not only embodying the New Woman ideal of the 1920s, but also inventing it. “Your women,” says a ghostly apparition of Rafaela, “are taking over the world.”

Director Rachel Chavkin’s production is stylish and fast-paced, leaving plenty of room for some genuine theatrical moments. “The most beautiful bracelet” by Iman is an act I sensational, as was the highlight of the evening, Beth Leavel’s tender, determined but resigned song about love and memory in Act II, in which she plays an aristocratic woman facing her own death.

Gould’s music lacks a strong melodic profile and tends to move quickly toward big, fortissimo notes that flatter his singer’s voices. But the setting of the text is clear and effective and the music seems to disappear when the drama (Leavel’s heartbreaking recognition of mortality) is essential.

The real Lempicka is having a moment right now. His work is exhibited in an exhibition at Sotheby’sand will receive museum treatment later this year in a retrospective in san francisco. She is not as well known as she deserves to be, but she was not as forgotten and helpless as this musical claims. Her career failed after emigrating to the United States and then to Mexico. But it was already being rediscovered in the 1960s, the subject of a major retrospective in Paris in 1972, and has been appearing in Madonna’s videos and shows for decades.

In a review published in the late 1980s in Woman’s Art Journal, a slightly dyspeptic critic argued that Lempicka’s art was more rejected than forgotten: “His Art Deco portraits are largely unknown today for two good reasons: they are hopelessly outdated and None of it was very good to begin with.”

“Lempicka” challenges both assumptions. The public can be inspired by the exhibition to seek out the art itself, which offers a more measured and reasonable response.

Lempicka, at Longacre Theatre, 220 W. 48th St., in New York. 150 minutes, including intermission. lempickamusical.com.