Eden Espinosa and the Cast of Broadway's Lempicka Are Cooking Up a Feast for the Senses

The new Broadway musical Lempicka invited The Broadway Show inside the Longacre Theatre to preview the bold production and the striking historical figure at the center of it.

Written by Carson Kreitzer (book and lyrics) and Matt Gould (book and music), the musical stars Eden Espinosa as Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka, a Polish painter who fled to Paris with her husband Tadeusz (played by Andrew Samonsky) in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. Set during the artistically rich interwar period, the show follows Tamara as she falls in love with her muse Rafaela (Amber Iman) and finds herself caught between the freedom of her new creative life and the strictures of marriage and motherhood.

"I have never done something like this before," Espinosa tells The Broadway Show. "I feel like it's a feast for the senses. For your ears, for your eyes, for your heart, for your mind. It's gonna challenge you to look at your life in a way that maybe you haven't before." Her castmate George Abud, who plays Italian artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, describes the production as "electric," while Iman, who performs one of Rafaela's booming numbers for the press, categorizes the show as an epic musical. "After the first two minutes, I think people are gonna be like, 'what the hell is this?!'" she says. "But in the best way." 

"She's not a subtle artist. And she was not a subtle woman by all accounts," director Rachel Chavkin says of the show's title figure, reflecting on how she chose to usher Tamara's assertive aesthetic to the stage. "We wanted to make something as fierce as she was."