Eden Espinosa is dynamic as Lempicka on Broadway

 

Many times over the years I’ve walked out of a Broadway musical thinking, I want to go back.  Never, though, have I been so enamored with a show as I was with Lempicka that I’m now considering booking a flight across the country because I want more.  More of this fascinating woman, that is. 

Tamara de Lempicka was a sought-after artist in the 1930s and 40s in Paris before falling into obscurity as tastes changed.  Carson Kreitzer and Matt Gould are telling her story -- “inspired” by her life and art -- and Eden Espinosa is brilliantly bringing her to life at the Longacre Theatre in a new musical directed by Rachel Chavkin.  I was so captivated by her story and artistic vision that I reread a New York Times feature that mentioned her work will have its first major museum retrospective in the United States, at the de Young Museum in San Francisco starting in October.  I immediately wanted to plan a trip.  I was only in that charming city once, when I was in college, and have always hoped to go back.  Now I have a good reason. 

Lempicka was a strong, independent woman who painted portraits and modern women like herself in a modernist Art Deco style; a great many were nudes.  Although the story spans more than a half century, little is known about her early life except that she was born in the 1890s in Poland to a Russian mother and a Polish father whom she describes as a Jewish merchant.  We first encounter her as an old, forgotten and alone woman on a park bench in Los Angeles who tells us her story, beginning in 1916 when she was a pretty young woman married to a Russian aristocrat, Tadeusz Lempicka.  The 1917 revolution toppled that privileged life in St. Petersburg when her husband was jailed and she had sex with his Bolshevik captors to free him.  “You walked in here a little rich girl,” one of them tells her. “Now you’re walking out a whore.”

They leave Russia with their infant daughter and little money and settle in Paris in 1918.  Tadeusz, unaccustomed to work, can’t find a job.  She had always loved to paint so she began formal training and started displaying her work in the streets of Paris, taking on the role of breadwinner while following her passion.  Her work catches the attention of intellectuals and Paris’s modern set, and she was the toast of the city’s fallen aristocrats and nightclub goers. 

Andrew Samonsky portrays her husband and Amber Iman her lover, Rafaela, with whom she carries on an affair in full knowledge of her husband with whom she maintains her marriage.  Standing at least six feet tall and railing thin, Iman is soulful, with a vulnerable core.  I believed in both relationships.  “I had the great good fortune to love not once, but twice,” Tamara tells us at the beginning.  “And I had the great misfortune to love them both at the same time.”

They have beautiful voices and Kreitzer has given them lovely lyrics that movingly and clearly tell their stories and the larger one, with music by Gould.

Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography has all the sizzle and excitement a show about this artist deserves.  And Paloma Young’s costumes are a lush delight.  Scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez’s layered platforms allow the story to move easily from apartment to nightclub and to the street.

It’s been 14 years since a friend suggested to Kreitzer, a playwright who likes to write about unconventional women, that she look into the complex and glamorous life and extraordinary talent of Lempicka, who was always better known in Europe than here, saying this woman who was far ahead of her time would be a good subject.  Several well-known people already knew this.  Madonna, Barbra Streisand and Jack Nicholson are collectors.

As Kreitzer researched, she began envisioning a musical as the proper vehicle, even though she had never written one.  Over the years it had readings, workshops, regional productions and premiered at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2018 with Espinosa starring.  The pandemic slowed its arrival on Broadway.  

The friend who came up from Virginia to see the show with me and loved it -- we were both in tears at the end -- wants to go with me to San Francisco for the art exhibit and a friend from high school who heard about my plans wants to come too.  I feel this is going to happen.  Thank you to all involved with Lempicka.   California here we come.