It has been quite a long time since I’ve been on Broadway, and even longer since I originated something on Broadway. This is your first return to the Broadway stage in about a decade-and-a-half, right?ĮSPINOSA: Yeah.

NEVINS: Well, I had the pleasure of seeing Lempicka this week, which was such a tour de force. She’s one of my favorite songwriters, so I like to really dive into all of it. NEVINS: I woke up to the news that she dropped a whole second album, so I’m trying to find the time to sit with it.ĮSPINOSA: I like to do a deep-dive, so I’ll do a peripheral listen but then I’ll really get into it later. I’m hoping to get some in later right before the show. NEVINS: Have you given Tortured Poets a listen yet?ĮSPINOSA: I did, but only the first three songs on the way to the doctor’s office earlier today. Today’s a big day for us Swifties.ĮSPINOSA: Today is a big day and the Lyft I’m in is playing “I Knew You Were Trouble,” so the synergy is all around. NEVINS: I see you’re wearing an Era’s Tour t-shirt. I think I’m going to be in the show tonight, which I’m excited about, but I’ve been a little under the weather. Last week, as the 46-year-old prepared to return to the show after spending a few days under the weather, she talked to me about getting back to her Broadway roots, embracing complicated women, and, of course, The Tortured Poet’s Department.ĮSPINOSA: I am on the mend. But she’s no longer playing to the crowd.

Earlier in her career, Espinosa explained, she might have avoided characters who don’t reflexively summon the audience’s sympathies. “The most fascinating thing about her work … is the colors and the way it feels like they’re lit from within.” Yet, as the show posits, Lempicka was also a bit of a lightning rod, a woman whose voracious appetite and instincts for survival would lead her to lie and manipulate reality and carry on affairs with both men and women. “ I’ve cried both times I’ve seen her work in person,” Espinosa told me. In 1917, Lempicka fled Russia during the revolution for Paris, where she would come to paint the mannered and highly stylized portraits of Jazz Age women that would later establish her as a pioneer of the form and a feminist icon. I hadn’t known Espinosa was a Swiftie, though it occurred to me that Tamara de Lempicka was the kind of outsized and trailblazing heroine of whom Swift, who once turned the life of the eccentric 1940s heiress-cum-socialite Rebekah Harkness into a winking earworm, would be fond. The morning I spoke to the actor Eden Espinosa, who currently stars in the original Broadway musical Lempicka about the visionary art deco painter of the same name, she was wearing an Era’s Tour t-shirt. Eden Espinosa, photographed by Justin Patterson at the Longacre Theatre.

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