This Original Broadway Musical Spotlights A Radical Female Artist And The Mark She Left

The new Broadway musical Lempicka celebrates the life of Polish artist Tamara de Lempicka. The French painter was known for her bold art deco portraits. She had a storied life that seemed unacceptable for a woman at the time. Considered a radical, Lempicka was a survivor of the Bolshevik revolution and the Nazis. While married and had relationships with women and men.

However, unlike her male contemporaries, this iconoclast who lived unapologetically has often been erased from history. “He was a person the world wanted to hide and tried to kill several times,” he says from Lempicka director Rachel Chavkin. “He lived this incredibly violent and ambitious life.”

16 years ago, when playwright and lyricist Carson Kreitzer discovered a Taschen art book about Lempicka in a used bookstore, she knew she had the ultimate material for a musical. “I had no idea about her intense and difficult life – what it took to become this artist and what was behind these dramatic, decadent figures,” she says.

And then there were the Lempicka paintings that Kreitzer found so amazing. “His female nudes often refer to classical paintings from the long tradition of men painting naked women,” says Kreitzer. “But his observation of the body is so exuberant, so sensual, that you can really feel his appreciation for that body, his desire.”

Kreitzer wished he had learned about Lempicka when he was growing up. “She was a woman of incredible vision. She had the kind of appetite that is often considered monstrous in a woman,” he says.

Early in her life, Lempicka was forced to flee Poland, took refuge in Paris and managed to make a career as an artist. And through this, his unique angular painting style managed to be sensual and excite people.

“One of the things I love most about her story is that only by losing everything she had did she become the painter she was meant to be,” says Kreitzer. “If it wasn't for the Russian Revolution and the total upheaval of her world, she wouldn't have been invented, and we wouldn't have the work she dedicated herself to creating.”

A bisexual woman Kreitzer also connected fiercely with Lempicka. “Tamara loved her husband, but she had affairs with women and men, and she thought it was her right to do so. I loved that,” Kreitzer says. “All she was asking for was what any male artist has taken for granted: a wife and a mistress. So there was family life at home and a muse, or collection of muses, in the studio.”

After discovering Lempicka Kreitzer met composer Matt Gould at the New Dramatists Composer-Librettist Studio. The program connects writers with composers as they collaborate on musical theater. After writing a song together, they felt an instant bond.

“We were very different in some ways, but very similar in our intensity, the way we threw ourselves into the work. And in tremendous laughter, too,” Kreitzer says. “Injuring Matt is still one of my favorite things to do. And we're also collaborating on this incredibly intense, deeply emotional material.” As Gould sees it, Carson is the brains and detail of their collaboration. “I'm passion, high, and big picture,” he says.

On the last day of his workshop, Kreitzer met Gould at a dinner party and slid his Lempicka art book across the table to him. Kreitzer asked, “Do you want to put on a show?”

They began writing their epic musical with Gould composing the music and Kreitzer writing the lyrics. The duo co-wrote the book together. Over time, his passion for Tamara de Lempicka and her paintings only deepened. They felt even more strongly that Lempicka's life would be so ideal for a musical. As Gould says, great art often comes from people who have been oppressed.

“There's something about the perfectly glowing healing of bodies in conversation with a fear/horror/passion behind people's eyes. It was that juxtaposition that seemed so obvious that it would lend itself to musical theater,” Gould says of the paintings of Lempicka He saw the rage of his subjects trapped within his beautiful veneer.

“For me juxtaposition and tension is what makes a song theatrical,” says Gould. “There's what we say we feel to the people around us, and then there's what we really feel inside. The 'real' feeling is the part that HAS to sing.”

They hoped that one day, perhaps, the show would make it to Broadway. “But in the back of our minds, we thought no one would ever produce a musical about a bisexual Jewish painter whose name no one could pronounce,” says Gould.

Despite her secret doubts this past month, Lempicka opened on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre. The cast includes Amber Iman, Andrew Samonsky, George Abud, Natalie Joy Johnson, Zoe Glick, Nathaniel Stampley, Beth Leavel and Eden Espinosa, who plays Tamara de Lempicka.

Director Rachel Chavkin and choreographer Raja Feather Kelly share the belief that the show is by no means a conventional biopic. “I think it's important for the public to know,” Chavkin says. “It offers the fusion of fashion, music videos and contemporary hunger at its heart, while also having this splendid epic punch.”

Chavkin sometimes half-jokingly calls the show “The Miz.” She sees that kind of ambition present in her form. “But Raja and I are inner-city kids too,” he says. “So it's always through the lens of experimentation and questioning.” For Kelly the show has contemporary reflections. “He wonders how what we learn about Tamara is reflected in our own lives,” he says.

from Lempicka The cast includes Amber Iman, Andrew Samonsky, George Abud, Natalie Joy Johnson, Zoe Glick, Nathaniel Stampley, Beth Leavel and Eden Espinosa, who plays Tamara de Lempicka. From the moment Espinosa joined the production in 2018, she was deeply invested in Lempicka's story.

“There was always something about this show and role that made me feel so much. It made me feel for her and have compassion and interest for her,” Espinosa says. “I would see a concert version or read, I saw how she would play it in my mind. And that feeling is like a magnet pulling you to a piece, that I just knew I had to be a part of it.” She was convinced that one day she would. “I didn't know how, but I hoped, and I knew somehow, that it would happen.”

After everything he's learned about her, if Gould could say anything to Lempicka, the first thing he would say is “Thank you,” he says. “For your bravery. For your willingness to show a world that wanted to annihilate your sex, your sexuality, your profession, your religion. Thank you for your willingness to risk everything to capture a moment in the time that would amazingly and predictably capture THAT moment in time.”

And what does Kritzer hope people take away from the show? “I hope people let her challenge them like she's challenged me all these years of working on it,” he says. “Live with more courage. Not accepting the smaller life that would make everyone else more comfortable. And it can be difficult and people will push back, but you have the right to be the protagonist of your own life”.