okay so literally nobody asked for this but have a free lempicka analysis based around the "unseen" final pose (btw this is NOT my original idea, it literally had to be pointed out to me in the discord lol ANYWAY-)

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"The new woman shows her profile - no longer looking down, demure..."

When we first meet Tamara de Lempicka, she is embittered by old age and her grief. What was versus what and the what now. In other words, what she's become. Still, her first utterances of the show have no traces of a person, nor who we'll come to discover later. Instead, an artist. A painter without any muse to speak of.

"Plane, lines, form."

"Plane, color, light."

"Damn... that's not right!"

Ever the perfectionist (or at least in my silly headcanon xoxo), she disregards her paintbrush with a grunt and addresses the audience. She takes her glasses off, a small smile playing at the edge of her lips. They are here to hear her story, and by Hell, she's going to tell it.

"Have you ever loved someone more than life itself?"

This is our first reminder that she is not just an artist, not just a painting machine, but a human as well. She has loved and lost, been found, and then forgotten time and time again, not just by those she loved dearly, but also by society as a whole.

She proceeds to describe her love, but as we soon discover, not one but two. That is all the information we get. That is all the information we need.

We see her recall her glory days, days of never-ending fame and the spotlight she's always so evidently coveted. Ultimately, though, we hear the distant chimes of what was. Not what it actually became.

The chimes of wedding bells. Listen closely to the instrumentals of "Something that the world had never seen," and then some following "I painted what a woman could be." A hint as to her first love as much as it is of the love she is currently singing about. With this, we can infer many a thing. One of her loves being a woman is one of them.

Furthermore, the underscoring, if you listen closely once more, is "Our Time," essentially the theme that perhaps reoccurs the most throughout the show (besides maybe "Woman Is"). It represents the theme that corrupted and destroyed her life, but also one that would come to transcend what it originally meant. To bring new meaning, per se.

Some more singing, and as Tamara proudly declares that "history is a bitch, but so am I!" the ensemble comes on, dressed in attire befitting the Russian setting we truly begin our story in. She transforms. No longer is she an older woman, embittered by age. She is young. About to be wed to the man of her dreams.

"The strange girl with the paintbrush."

Does this entail that she's always been seen as odd, even by Russian aristocracy standards? I'm not too sure, but it's always what I've inferred from this line...

"I will be a Lempicka!"

A proud declaration of Tamara's. However, it is not something immediately followed by an optimistic glance into the distance, the above. She, in fact, glances below. Looking down demurely, we see Tamara at the start of her journey. Not a trailblazing artist, but someone who has very much accepted, or at least considered, conforming to the rules of society and to her marriage. Perhaps art is her passion, but she does not know it is her everything yet.

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ok bye i'm not okay