‘Lempicka’ Broadway review: Painter musical is an epic wreck

What “Lempicka,” the mystifying new musical about Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka, wants more than something else is turpentine.

Gallons and gallons of it.

Sad to say, having garishly blared open Sunday night time at the Longacre Theatre, it is much much too late for the creators to commence in excess of once more on a blank canvas.

And so, the hideous splatter that audiences are remaining to parse is a ridiculous two-and-fifty percent-hour Eurovision act with stratospheric delusions of grandeur. 

The unwieldy present, with a reserve and lyrics by Carson Kreitzer and songs by Matt Gould, grapples with this kind of lofty matters as fascism, misogyny, homophobia and the character of what excellent art is.   

“Isn’t perfection the enemy?,” a character named the Baroness (Beth Leavel), who I could explain to you just very little about, asks the founder of Futurism Filippo Marinetti (George Abud), a loon who prizes smooth efficiency in excess of intimate attractiveness.

Could quite perfectly be, Baroness. But in musical theater, coherency is unquestionably your good friend. And “Lempicka” is incoherent.

Get started with the comically wide location. The musical spans the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, World War I and Planet War II, ultimately calling it quits in 1975 America. Fifty-eight many years. Consider that, “Evita”!

A wife and mother, Tamara (Eden Espinosa) ventures from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Paris, France, exactly where she results in being a bisexual artist greatest identified for her uncommon nude portraits of fans, each male and woman. 

As director Rachel Chavkin’s output is staged on what appears to be the set from a “Starlight Express” in Peoria, none of these time intervals or spots experience any unique from a further. I did, nonetheless, commence to daydream about roller-skate races.

Confusingly, figures are inclined to keep frozen in time, hardly ever perceivably transforming a great deal from a single scene — or 10 years — to the future. Tamara’s daughter Kizette (Zoe Glick) stays inexplicably a baby for some 30 many years. Possibly the rationale there is that the girl has been immortalized by her mother’s paintings, but it’s just additional higher-minded twaddle.

Once in the Town of Lights — a lot more correctly, the Metropolis of Lasers — the writers try out to give wood Tamara some substantially required individuality, and the arctic plot some heat, by shoving in a appreciate triangle among the artist, her partner Tadeusz (Andrew Samonsky) and just one of her subjects, Rafaela (Amber Iman). 

If that established-up rings untrue, it is since Rafaela is a composite of quite a few distinctive associates of Tamara. We by no means fully buy into her as a genuine man or woman, mainly because details are so scant. The scandalous Spouse vs. Girlfriend deal with-off is affordable. And in the end, we’re advised fictional Rafaela both died in the Holocaust, or lived a extended and content everyday living. Gee, many thanks. 

Espinosa and Iman have no chemistry, by the way. Ignore the frequent criticism of two actors not being in the very same present — this pair is not even in the exact room.

Gould’s rating is a get-bag of variations and genres. Rafaela’s bash-in-the-street entrance number, “Don’t Guess Your Heart,” has a ‘90s Disney vibe, a la “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” whilst Marinetti’s beep-boop “Perfection” is an amped-up “Mr. Roboto” by Styx.

The latter — energetically sung by Abud when choreographer Raja Feather Kelly has the ensemble do plane arms — is catchy, but so is “Kokomo.”

Espinosa is handed some colorless, belty ballads, like “Woman Is,” that she struggles vocally with. Offered that Tamara’s story occurs above 6 tumultuous a long time, the actress and character leave remarkably minimal perception. Lemicka is neither a drive of character, nor a relatable dreamer — she’s a conversing paintbrush.

And Kreitzer’s e book, other than becoming strenuous to follow, is tonally unhinged.

Guaranteed, “Les Miserables,” the peer of which “Lempicka” aspires to be, had both equally the devastating “I Dreamed A Dream” and the silly “Master of the Home.” 

But that’s a significantly cry from projecting video clip footage of Adolph Hitler onstage and then soon thereafter acquiring a lesbian bar proprietor named Suzy (Natalie Pleasure Johnson) joke, “Nice fur. I just appreciate beaver.”

It’s difficult to consider this muck is directed by the gifted Chavkin, who in the past has staged adventurous new musicals like “Hadestown” and “Natasha, Pierre and the Excellent Comet of 1812” with plain talent and panache. 

Right here, however, her attempts are squandered on jazzing up a exhibit that is more involved with its individual warped concept of what epicness is relatively than its people or tale. 

Tamara starts and finishes the messy musical rather substantially as Forest Gump — sitting down on a bench in 1975 Los Angeles, prepared to inform stories about a everyday living lived in the shadow of a switching environment.

And, as the curtain went down on perplexing “Lempicka,” a version of Gump’s well known estimate went by means of my head: Broadway is like a box of chocolates. You hardly ever know what you are going to get.