Photos by Joan Marcus

 

 

                                             By Eugene Paul

                                                         

Two of Broadway’s “innest” leading ladies, award winning Patti LuPone and award winning Christine Ebersole, in the same show?  Must see.  Playing the leading power icons in the beauty business, Helena Rubinstein, Empress of Unguents and Elizabeth Arden Queen of Creams? Gotta See. At dirty, rotten business loggerheads? Yesss! What a fab idea. Think of the possibilities for fun, fashion, flash and clash. Yummm. David Korins’  imaginative sets? Catherine Zuber’’s supersvelte costumes? Christopher Gatelli’s choreography? Michael Greif’s shazam directing? Gold standard Kenneth Posner’s lighting? Award maven Brian Ronan’s sound? Everything top of the line. What could go  wrong? Not in Doug Wright’s tailored, utilitarian book.,  Not in Scott Frankel’s near operatic score, the heart of the show. Yum, yum, yum, yum.

 

 

Not Yum, yum, yum, yum.  Maybe yum yum.  For the two leads.

here are too many eggs in this souffle and nothing to sink your teeth in. When they get a chance for something meaty – lord knows there are opportunities – the book shies off. Still, it all goes down smoothly, down, down, down inevitably, because of what is underneath all this superb professionalism. Ugliness.  We meet Elizabeth Arden at her already successful struggle halfway to the heights, beyond anything any other woman accomplished in the corporate world. She’d reinvented herself far, far, far from the stick of a farm girl her environment had drabbed her. Anything to get out, get away, get free, to be utterly different, to be beautiful, to wield power, to have unprecedented influence. Grit, brains, steely resolve, she transforms herself into her dream: elegance, exclusiveness, upper class.

 

It is extraordinary that at the same time, a handsome, haunted girl in a Polish shtetl, visions of countesses, princesses, empresses in her daily dreams, all those who scorned her lowly Jewish origins, this driven girl translated her mother’s peasant recipes for curative ointments into fabulous sources of scientific beautifiers for impeccable skin, impeccable rebirth, impeccable lives the equal royalty, her vaunted royalty. She became Madame Helene Rubinstein, mistress of royal jellies, creator of dreams of magic transformations, transforming herself over and over, each polish more gleaming than the last until she was a gem herself.  She was bound to become the adversary of Elizabeth Arden, the only real competitor to absolute domination of the beauty business.  If Arden was American high society, Rubinstein was European royalty at a time Americans were hungry for the éclat. Arden polished her business to polish herself.  Rubinstein polished herself to polish her business. The results were blinding successes.

 

And accomplished book craftsman Doug Wright’s perplexity mounts as he lays out scenarios for each of his queens, how in blazes to get to the level of personal conflicts between these two titans of beauty products who never met, each exploiting women in every vulnerability available.  Never before had make up, face creams, whole regimes been built into the sale of stuff to make women irresistible leap to the forefront of a woman’s goals,  a conceptual travesty of their own devising aided and exploited by these two dragons battling to dominate female ids on their way into their pocketbooks, said pocketbooks flush with cash predominantly provided by males besotted by their desires for luscious looking  females, preferably classy. Only their tax returns would declare which beauty queen was the winner, but book writer Doug Wright  doesn’t go there, he goes to setting up song and dance numbers extolling Arden’s sale of dreams versus Rubinstein’s sale of fantasies.

 

And since Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole don’t exactly dance, are stars because of their pipes and delivery of auras of emotional panoramas, natural focus is on the score.  Composer Scott Frankel’s almost operatic concept of the entire show gives each of his divas arias in which to shine, met with invariable enthusiastic applause. Lyrics? Almost strictly utilitarian.  These are not poetic flights type dames. Having two glorious voices to work with, embellished by artistic electronics, does not mean you get pure, clean Korie lyrics all the time but what the hell, it’s LuPone, it’s Ebersole.

 

 Christine Ebersole and John Dossert

 

Almost lost in the swanning of the divas are the contributions of the males in their lives, their vital roles in building the companies, in building the legends.  John Dossett, as Tommy Lewis, Elizabeth’s long supportive husband, her staunchest ally, kept in the shadows by his demanding wife, makes clear, brash impressions every time he gets the chance, as does Douglas Sills, Helena Rubinstein’s brilliant homosexual sales director. Both men reach their limits of putting up with the demands of their bosses, both men betray them to the enemy when they are fed up.

 

Patti LuPone and Douglas Sills

 

It’s not a feel good show, it’s a to admire show, and there’s lots to admire. But you don’t care.  Without its two, really truly stars, it would be -- well, it wouldn’t be.  Just wouldn’t. In spite of all the expensive expertise.

                                                         

War Paint. At the Nederlander Theatre, 208 West 41^st Street.  Tickets: $69-$199. 877-250-2929. 2 hrs 30 min. Open run.