Lempicka Review: A Tonally Jumbled Celebration of the Undervalued “Baroness with a Brush”
3 / 10
Lempicka sometimes recalls another unfortunate histrionic history. Diana the Musical, while disastrous on paper, recognized its own essential ridiculousness, rebranded itself as utter camp, and gracefully ended its short Broadway run with a naughty wink. But a musical about Princess Diana was clearly a terrible idea. Lempicka, by contrast, is always on the cusp of camp but unable to look itself in the mirror, so it never stands a chance of being so bad it’s good because it wants to be good so badly. It’s that friction—the tendency toward high camp in conflict with a more austere self-importance—that suggests a show at war with itself.
