Faced with these compelling figures and their fascinating stories, the musical's creators, inspired by Lindy Woodhead's same-titled book and the Ann Carol Grossman-Arnie Reisman documentary The Powder & the Glory, have done everything possible to suppress them and cram them into dust-caked boxes. That, I'm sorry to say, is the end of the good news. Elizabeth and Helena are daring and cagey, yeshow could they be anything else?but as tackled by these glittery veterans, who detail their portrayals down to their velvety lips and lacquered fingernails, you're getting the complete picture of them you need and want, not a stodgy hagiography. As you follow the magnates through 30 years (from 1935 to 1964) of jousting, both performers unlock the steely and sympathetic sides of the women they're playing, so that the strength and the hurt are seldom far removed from each other. It's not that what book writer Doug Wright, composer Scott Frankel, lyricist Michael Korie, and director Michael Greif have brought to Broadway (following a run at Chicago's Goodman Theatre last summer) is terrible, per se, but it's so scintillatingly boring that you'll spend more of the two-and-a-half-hour evening fight off an encroaching coma than analyzing lyrics like "In cocktails with one dash of bitters / Do you like them better with two? / Do olives adorn your martinis / More than onions do?" (Come to think of it, that might be a good thing).Įbersole (herself a Tony-winning Grey Gardens alumna) is nothing but silvery class as the high-minded Elizabeth, and LuPone, despite getting tangled frequently in Helena's Polish accent, contrasts firmly and appropriately with hard-as-granite appeal, highlighting the essential differences between two women who otherwise had a lot in common (both were immigrants who smashed through corporate glass ceilings to forge markets). That it never quite gets there is attributable solely to the show's stars, Christine Ebersole (as Elizabeth) and Patti LuPone (as Helena), and a design team that has made everything look much better than it actually is. In trying to depict the decades-long feud between cosmetics titans Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, the team behind the cult succès d'estime Grey Gardens has been too interested in slathering on content to notice that the frail skeleton beneath is, at best, half a step away from disintegration. This lesson has been forgotten, or rather vivisected, in the new musical War Paint that just opened at the Nederlander. That's also true of the theatre, where judicial application of speech, song, and dance tends to say more and pierce deeper than a colossal brain dump. You don't need to be obsessed with beauty products to grasp the timeless axiom about makeup: Less is more. Theatre: Nederlander Theatre, 208 West 41st Street between 7th and 8th Avenues Cast: Patti LuPone, Christine Ebersole, John Dossett, Douglas Sills, Barbara Jo Bednarczuk, Patti Cohenour, Mary Ernster, Tom Galantichm David Girolmo, Joanna Glushak, Chris Hoch, Mary Claire King, Steffanie Leigh, Erik Liberman, Barbara Marineau, Donna Migliaccio, Stephanie Jae Park, Angel Reda, Jennifer Rias, Tally Sessions. Inspired by War Paint by Lindy Woodhead and The Powder & the Glory by Ann Carol Grossman and Arnie Reisman.