Tony-winning director Rachel Chavkin says musical captures a real-life Art Deco painter caught up in historic events
In 1920s and ‘30s Paris, Polish-Russian Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka was a celebrated artist who mingled with European aristocrats and the culturati and became know as the “baroness with the brush.”
The “Lempicka” creative team of composer Matt Gould, left, playwright Carson Kreitzer and director Rachel Chavkin at La Jolla Playhouse. Lempicka was openly bisexual and famously painted some of her female lovers, including Rafaela Fano and Suzy Solidor, in the nude. Her first husband, Baron Tadeusz Lempicki, divorced her in 1931 over her serial affairs. She was also a neglectful mother and had a strong and forceful personality, qualities art historians might have overlooked in a male artist.
Twelve years ago, Kreitzer and Gould sat down together in old church in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen and wrote the first song for their “Lempicka” musical, which had its first script reading in 2011. Three years later, Kreitzer emailed Chavkin about the project and Chavkin was immediately hooked. The musical’s central characters are Lempicka, her husband Tadeusz and her lover and muse Rafaela . The musical covers the great moments of transition in Lempicka’s life, including the flight from Russia, the choices Lempicka makes to follow her artistic and romantic muse at great cost, and her decision to leave Paris with her second husband as the Nazis close in.
People look at a painting by Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka at the Bellas Artes Museum in Mexico City in 2009.
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