Behind the Scenes of a Short-Lived Broadway Musical

“Lempicka,” which opened on Broadway on April 14th and closed on May 19th, after forty-one performances, was one of that type. Created by the playwright Carson Kreitzer and the composer Matt Gould, both Broadway first-timers, it opened during one of the most crowded theatre seasons in recent memory, among adaptations of popular I.P. (“Back to the Future,” “The Notebook”), jukebox musicals (“Hell’s Kitchen”), and splashy revivals (“Cabaret”; “Merrily We Roll Along,” a onetime Stephen Sondheim flop turned posthumous Broadway hit). “Lempicka” was one of an increasingly rare species in Times Square—a work conceived entirely from scratch. A propulsive, poppy “bio-musical” in the tradition of “Evita,” it chronicled the life story of Tamara de Lempicka, a bisexual Art Deco painter who was famous in her heyday, in nineteen-twenties Paris, but who subsequently fell into obscurity. That it got to Broadway at all was due in significant part to the reputation of its director, the forty-three-year-old Tony winner Rachel Chavkin, who with two previous musicals—“Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812” and “Hadestown”—had established a track record of turning offbeat projects into hits on the Broadway stage.