Much like the Art Deco canvases that defined her career, the musical Lempicka attempts to capture a larger-than-life figure through bold strokes, but ultimately leaves the audience with an unfinished patchwork of themes.

The show is a biographic depiction of Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish painter famous during the interwar years.

The musical begins in 1975 California, where an older Lempicka laments that nobody remembers her glorious past. On stage, she transforms into a young bride, though the transition feels oddly unconvincing, as if a contemporary musical were relying on an old theatrical device.

Tamara falls in love with Tadeusz Lempicki, a Polish aristocrat. After the Bolsheviks arrest him, Tamara offers herself to a high-ranking officer in exchange for his release.

The couple relocates to Paris, but while Tadeusz remains bitter and directionless, Tamara begins painting portraits and gradually builds a successful career. Through Baron Raoul Kuffner and his wife, she encounters Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who dismisses traditional portraiture as art for the rich and powerful.

At a bar, Tamara becomes fascinated by Rafaela, a bohemian prostitute. Although she usually paints her daughter, Tamara now wants to paint Rafaela instead. The two begin a passionate relationship, but Tamara refuses to acknowledge it publicly.

Rafaela later attends the International Exposition against Tamara’s wishes. Tadeusz bitterly remarks that he and Rafaela share the same woman. Offered work back in Poland, he asks Tamara to leave Paris with him.

After a major argument, Rafaela leaves. Tadeusz, believing Tamara no longer wants him, prepares to depart as well. Tamara finally confesses that she still wants him, but he replies that it is too late.

As fascism rises across Europe, Marinetti reappears aligned with Mussolini’s movement, while people deemed undesirable begin disappearing. The Baroness, worried about her husband’s safety as a Jew, asks Tamara to care for him after her death.

Back in 1975 Los Angeles, Tamara admits that she could control the rectangular canvas, but not the world. Ironically, this tension between control and chaos is something the musical itself never fully resolves.

Lempicka constantly tries to convince the audience that Tamara de Lempicka was an extraordinary woman, yet it never fully clarifies what truly drives her. Most of her relationships feel calculated or carefully managed. The few things she actively seems to choose are rescuing her husband from prison, pursuing Rafaela with obsessive fascination, and painting itself.

The show frames Rafaela as liberation and passion, yet Tamara spends much of the musical trying to hide and control the relationship. Rafaela often feels less like an equal partner than a lover absorbed into Lempicka’s carefully managed world. I understand the historical context, but I kept wondering not simply why the relationship had to remain hidden, but why the secrecy itself had to become such a central dramatic engine. Interwar European artistic and upper-class circles were hardly simple moral worlds, and the repeated concealment sometimes felt more theatrically imposed than emotionally organic. Ironically, Suzy’s club never feels especially secretive at all.

That is why the show reminded me somewhat of The Queen of Versailles. It is essentially a self-mythologizing biography, but it never fully persuades the audience either to admire Tamara or to emotionally understand her philosophy of life. The musical continually introduces dramatic material without ever discovering a stable emotional center.

Ironically, Lempicka’s paintings themselves seem to explain her more clearly than the musical does. Looking at her work, it feels as though what fascinated her most was the stylized human body of Art Deco modernism. If the musical had emphasized more clearly that Tamara loved beauty itself — whether embodied by wealthy aristocrats who commissioned portraits or Rafaela, who brought her little practical advantage — then her attraction to Rafaela might have felt far more emotionally coherent.

The recurring “Adam and Eve” imagery using both Rafaela and Tadeusz gestures toward this idea. It suggests not only her divided affections, but also her fascination with idealized human beauty itself.

Instead, the musical often presents Tamara’s strongest passions only when she is intoxicated, reckless, or emotionally unstable. Rafaela leaves, and almost immediately Tamara turns back toward her husband. The show repeatedly insists that Tamara loved both of them, yet the emotional logic connecting those relationships remains frustratingly diffuse.

Part of the problem may be that secondary figures such as Marinetti or Suzy never gain much dimensionality beyond their narrative functions. The musical also keeps returning to money, expensive paintings, wealthy patrons, and social status without fully integrating those themes into a unified portrait of Tamara herself.

Tamara did not need to be portrayed as morally admirable. A worldly, calculating artist could have been fascinating. Yet the musical repeatedly softens or decorates her ambition with melodramatic justification, making her feel less human and ultimately less interesting.

The music creates another layer of dissonance. Kim Sun-young and Son Seung-yeon sang extraordinarily well, and the actors playing the husband and daughter were also strong. Yet the production places huge contemporary belt-driven numbers onto an industrial set filled with bohemian and fading aristocratic costumes moving toward modernism. Ensemble members constantly scatter across the stage, pulling attention in multiple directions.

Ironically, a jazzier or more avant-garde musical language might have suited the material better. The current score pushes so aggressively toward grand emotional theatricality that the show often feels closer to epic melodrama than to the cold, sensual, geometric world suggested by Lempicka’s paintings.

People calculate when survival and ambition are at stake. Tamara did not need to hide behind decorative melodrama. By trying to soften her sharp edges and make her more palatable or tragic, the musical ironically makes her less compelling.

Lempicka ultimately tries to hold onto two conflicting impulses at once. The writers want the edgy glamour of a woman who defied social norms, yet they hesitate to let her remain fully ruthless, calculating, or emotionally opaque. Had the musical trusted Tamara to remain an unapologetically difficult heroine pursuing beauty, survival, and power without apology, it might have become something far more distinctive.