LEMPICKA - dramaturgical advice

[Mitch101]

Posted: 3/27/24 at 8:54pm

How arrogant of me to post this thinking anyone involved in the show will see this… but why not. Here goes:

Your show is about the beauty of living, survival is at the core. Almost every character is a survivor of some kind, but especially your lead. Beauty (not only meaning pretty) is your way into the evening.

Your fourth song is I believe called “Beauty” and it’s the first moment that actually earns the audience cheers. Take this song and create an adapted version to open the show. Cut all that stupid monologue she does on the bench. Who cares that she had two loves at the same time. It’s a funny line that means nothing. But at the end of her life, she might now have an answer to the question of what is beauty. Take the lyrics of the main solo and adapt them into questions that she asks at the top.

Cut as much as can be cut in Our Time and the Paris song to get us to “Beauty” as soon as possible so we get her I want song much earlier. You don’t need her mother telling her to smile as a set up for the jail scene or the act two moment with her daughter. So long as she is trying to discover what is beauty, when she sees her daughter force the smile she has learned enough in life to tell her daughter not to do it, as she does. 
 

End the show with the world discovering her art, as you do, but by now we the audience will be wiser to the beauty it took to create it all, the pain, the survival, the love and joy and compromises. This is what will make the show universal. When you focus on the emotional journey of Tamara and how it impacts the world around her. The world caught up to her beauty. That is wholly missing right now.

These are very simple changes that will make all the difference and any artistic team worth their salt would have no problem achieving in a matter of days. This is how so many great moments in musical theatre came to pass…stop trying to put lipstick on a pig and go back to basics to focus the show on the emotional core of what could be there- currently missing. But the clues are there!

I hope this isn’t the most arrogant post ever. It really is meant as one theatre geeks love of musicals.

[BrodyFosse123]

Posted: 3/27/24 at 9:19pm

These notes are glorious. I hope it gets into the hands of the creative team just to plant seeds, nothing more. Kudos. 

[kurtal]

Posted: 3/28/24 at 12:01am

Yeah, you're spot on, Mitch.

 

[hayden6]

Posted: 3/28/24 at 12:57am

Love these ideas, and I think they'd really elevate the show.

[GilmoreGirlO2]

Posted: 3/28/24 at 9:41am

Great thoughts and I will especially echo: “Go back to basics to focus the show on the emotional core of what could be there.”

I consider the Williamstown production one of my favorite musicals I’ve ever seen. The current Broadway iteration feels like an empty shell of its former self. It pains me to know what this show could have been (and was) - it truly felt special and it's so disappointing that Broadway audiences aren't getting to experience the things I loved about the show 7 years ago.

In Williamstown, there was such heart and all of the relationships felt clearer, more grounded, and real. We were on a journey with a woman whose world is opening up in so many ways (while still battling her past) and discovering things about herself – including the power of being able to literally use her own two hands to keep her and her family alive. I recall so many moments and lines that felt so poignant and universal as we watched Lempicka carve this path for herself. So many of those moments have either been cut or lost among the broad strokes (pun intended), constant movement, and insertion of playing so many moments for laughs that are now in place.

To the creatives: Trust the original core of what you wrote – not all change is better (and you don’t have to take pains to make a show so much “bigger” just because it’s now in a Broadway theatre – like trying to constantly fill the stage with dancers at every turn).