Repainting Broadway

Lempicka is changing the narrative by making room for a new kind of character.

- Repainting Broadway 

Carson Kreitzer loves that Tamara de LemC They were small lies: fits that didn't create international conflict, cause grave misfortune, or ruin lives (that we know of). A woman trying to make it as a painter in the male-dominated Paris art scene between the two World Wars, Lempicka needed to stretch the truth to be taken seriously, suggests Kreitzer, who's part of the team behind Lempicka, a new Broadway musical opening this spring. The painter became an Art Deco star and a member of the avant-garde who ran with the likes of Picasso and Jean Cocteau, helped along by fabrications about, for instance, her daughter, whom she would introduce as her sister to appear younger to possible collaborators. A century later, her lavish lifestyle, theatrical paintings, and extreme chutzpah made her a prime candidate for an exuberant, lights-flashing musical.

"She was the protagonist, no question....She had this kind of delicious greed. She wanted things in a way that women weren't allowed to," Kreitzer says. "That's part of the reason she lied all the time, because she had to, because she wouldn't have gotten where she did if she was honest." Before Kreitzer brought the idea of Lempicka to her now collaborator Matt Gould, she had a "galaxy of women" history had overlooked that she wanted to bring into the mainstream. Lempicka was high on the list, and when she met Gould 14 years ago, Kreitzer says it felt like "kismet"-they clicked creatively and in the way they worked. While Kreitzer wrote Lempicka's dialogue and lyrics and Gould composed the music, both take credit for the book, as they've pieced every moment of the show together.