LEMPICKA
(Triggering vs Earning—Part 1)
Book, Lyrics and Original Concept by Carson Kreitzer
Book and Music by Matt Gold
Directed by Rachel Chavkin
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
In my recent review of Teeth, I opened with a rumination on how, when functioning as a critic, I now have to take in and assess some very different criteria, with regard to musicals: Audience reaction used to be a gut-check to my personal perceptions as a practitioner. But not so much anymore. So many more things inform audience reaction now—the pervasiveness of music videos; the instant-star fix of [Whatever Country’s] Got Talent bombast; the influence of the still-very-few successful Euro-musicals (from the ‘70s and ‘80s) on the general audience’s idea of what a musical is or what a musical sounds like; the disconnectedness of the general audience, and many of the profession’s young Social Justice Warriors, from the classic repertoire and subsequently from the guiding principles of craft…all of which has contributed to both a de-education and an inevitable new standard for what’s acceptable; for as I said in that prior review, enthusiastic audience response is as likely to be triggered as to be earned.
But a pervasive communal response is still a legitimate response.
What makes this important is how much harder it has become to offer an appraisal of worth. Or anyway, explicable worth vs. eye-of-the-beholder worth. The thought just occurs to me that my new book—and forgive me collaterally plugging it—makes that very point, albeit in a different context. I argue, in The Novelizers, that script adaptations, and original stories told in borrowed universes, are genuine literature; that it takes just as much skill, craft and artistry to adapt a dramatic property into prose as it does to adapt prose into a dramatic property.
And the truth is…it likewise takes a certain category of skill, craft and artistry to trigger a response; to appeal to a gestalt pop culture perception through the tricks, tropes, clichés and vocabulary of commodity conditioning. It ain’t just casual karaoke.
So…I’m going to offer something a little different—and perhaps a little more useful—than my reviewing each of the new musicals in this edition granularly. I’m going to give you a general impressionistic sense of what you’ll be in for viscerally, as you consider which you may fork over a hefty ticket price to attend. Assume as read that all performers are expert and that production values are likewise impressive and expertly executed, because I don’t want to get bogged down in aspects you can read about in detail elsewhere—and may have already. Also take this as read: in all cases, the audience is, indeed responsive. Which means we’ve reached a point where the fate of a given show can go either way, depending upon the consensus of reviews and how much acknowledgement end-of-season awards nominations—if the show has lasted that long—give it…which can override response, because potential ticket buyers will often heed that consensus.
Here goes:
Lempicka—about Polish artist Tamera de Lempicka (1898–1980)—starts with bass-beat thumping and shooting white lines of light against black, describing (we will shortly intuit) the signature curves in the outlines of her paintings of nudes. This immediately signals that the atmosphere of history will not be meaningfully evoked in music, that the controversial sexuality of her career will be dominant, and that therefore examination in depth will not be part of the equation. (Yes, little things like that send messages that big.) Not only does this turn out to be true throughout, but it’s accompanied by a desperate naivete. The show opens with an older Lempicka (Eden Espinosa) on a park bench, looking over a new canvas in progress. “Plane, line, form,” she says.
Oh really?
Upon hearing this, my companion of the afternoon mimed a piano arpeggio.
How does an entire creative team not understand that they’re evoking the opening of a much better musical likewise about a famous artist?
This willingness to say, Nah, we’re okay informs what seems to be an inability to dramatize below the surface. Lempicka is basically a life-and-career summary delivered in broad strokes narrative with tabloid confrontation—her philandering husband (Andrew Samonsky), her open-secret lesbian lover (Amber Iman), their standoff rivalry, her neglected daughter (Zoe Glick), the melodrama when she tells her husband exactly what she had to do (guess) to able to rescue him from Nazi incarceration…and the songs are part and parcel of this thick-line magic marker approach, characters first-person-narrating their states of being rather than expressing themselves with in a credibly human way, with dimension and subtext.
Literally as I was typing this, the closing notice for Lempicka hit my “in” box. It goes away on May 19. The release contains this; the italics are mine: “In a statement, the producers said, “We are so proud of our production and the family of artists and artisans who’ve shaped it. Few knew better than Tamara de Lempicka that art isn’t easy but always worth the effort.”
Okay, I think that rests my case.
Triggering vs Earning
(More parts to follow)