GRAMOPHONE Review: War Paint – Original Broadway Cast Recording/Frankel
The title, the concept, the casting would seem to have Broadway success written all over it. A musical about the bitter rivalry between two iconic cosmetic giants – Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden – who never met but here, of course, do (a touch of Mary Stuart about this), the casting of two sizeable Broadway divas, Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole (guess who’s first on the “equal” billing), and a title as perfect as it is apposite – War Paint. It had to work, didn’t it?
Well, hearing the album having not seen the show (it wasn’t a smash and closed early on account of Miss LuPone’s hip replacement surgery – something you could almost have written into the drama) tells its own story. My word of mouth (and the text and synopsis I have before me) suggest that we are a few products short of a parfumerie on the dramatic stakes. Bitter rivalries apart, there is some intrigue in the ladies’ right hand men – one a husband, one a gay companion – and the switching of allegiances to be exploited in that. And there’s the small matter of an intervening world war. But the essence of War Paint lies with the larger-than-life ladies themselves and a score from the excellent Scott Frankel and Michael Korie (the writers of Grey Gardens) that gives both divas plenty to chew on.
Frankel’s sinuous melodies can be so intriguing and Korie’s lyrics are smart, witty and always highly literate. More importantly Frankel seems instinctively to know how to write for LuPone and Ebersole’s voices. The legendary LuPone belt is still thrilling (witness her arrival “Back On Top”) and you sort of accept the cartoonish East-European/Jewish accent as something that’s a part of her large, larger, largest, personality. “My American Moment” is a number I keep returning to for its almost cantorial chromatic melody and the duet “If I’d Been a Man” (such a neat idea in the
mouths of two powerful women) is super-clever and again melodically stealthy. Neat, too, to have the act one closer “Face to Face” as a stirring emotive premonition of their climactic meeting.
Frankel is such a sophisticated composer who wears his talent and skill so discreetly. There are, of course, the “glamour” numbers – the touches of traditional trumpet-flaring Broadway – which are less effective divorced from the by all accounts lush staging. But equally there is clever comedy (hard to achieve) in the men’s duet “Dinosaurs” where Korie comes into his own. Love this exchange: “Love ‘em, loathe ‘em, they’re the stuff of lore/ Life don’t grow them mammoth anymore. Never was/ Never was any bigger since/ Maybe the Smithsonian should mount their friggin’ footprints.”
Both ladies get their eleven o’clock numbers, both of which I shall return to: Ebersole with “Pink”, Arden’s signature colour, and LuPone with “Forever Beautiful” where among the portraits that “trap her in amber” she projects a biting irony in Frankel’s best Kurt Weillian tones. Custom made for LuPone.
And, yes, even divorced from the stage, I was stirred by the ladies’ “secret” face to face exchange – “Beauty in the World” – whose storming climax is exactly what you expect from a Broadway score but whose quizzical quiet pay-off takes it somewhere else.
