At Joe Allen, a restaurant on Forty-sixth Street where denizens of the theatre world have been convening for nearly six decades, the walls are lined with posters of Broadway’s legendary duds. In the early days, for a show to make the display, it had to close in less than a week. Qualifying flops included such productions as “Drat! The Cat!,” a sex farce about a Victorian cat burglar (eight performances), and “Via Galactica,” a seventies rock opera about a trash collector who lives on an asteroid (seven performances). Joe Allen specializes in comfort food—burgers, banana cream pie—and there is something oddly comforting, too, about its morbid choice of décor. No single misfire stands alone; failure is its own kind of rite of passage, to be commemorated along with success. The first poster that the restaurant ever hung, in 1965, was for “Kelly,” about a man who jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge and survives. The show was such a fiasco that the writers sued the producers even before it premièred; it opened and closed on the same day.
Not all unsuccessful shows, however, are spectacular implosions or paragons of bad taste. There is another, more common, type of Broadway misfire that is less dramatic but perhaps more disappointing—a production that has many things going for it, with a closely collaborative team working furiously until the last moment, never losing faith that it will find an audience. Instead of crashing and burning, it opens and sputters. Some diehard fans adore it, but it becomes apparent—after the first reviews appear and then, more clearly, after the Tony nominations—that the show cannot sustain itself. Maybe it was bad timing. Maybe it was bad advertising. Maybe it was the whims of the marketplace. Maybe, if the show had only had a few more weeks of rehearsals, its admirable but unhoned elements might have slid into place.
“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.
Chavkin is by her own description a “devourer of outside information,” including feedback about her work. In the weeks before a show’s première, she invites friends and former collaborators to see it and asks them to text her “one good thing and one bad thing.” She told me, “I am trying to always be listening to where my own taste comes into contact with the room’s taste. An audience is so good at teaching you, What’s this moment about?”
The night of “Lempicka” ’s “final dress”—the first performance before an audience—Chavkin was standing near the stage door of the Longacre Theatre, wearing an oversized patchwork coat. She has a decidedly Gen X sense of personal style (baggy flannel shirts, combat boots, chunky black glasses) and most days pulls her long brown hair into a girlish style: pigtail buns, Heidi braids. She is rarely without a giant backpack full of scripts, reference books, a battered Nalgene bottle, Tupperware tubs of leftovers, and an iPad featuring a sticker that reads “You Are on Native Land.” In conversation, her favorite words include “fuck” and “yummy,” an adjective she uses to describe a particularly satisfying idea or dramatic moment.
“Lempicka” was about to begin a month of previews, when the show would be open to the general public but not yet officially “locked” for reviewers. Chavkin said that this is “when the real work begins,” as the clock starts ticking down to opening night. She is not someone who gets easily stressed. At a recent checkup, the doctor told her that she had the blood pressure of a twelve-year-old. Her husband, Jake Heinrichs, a theatrical-lighting supervisor, said that, even during intensive work periods, “Rachel always falls asleep in five minutes.” But she’d experienced a moment of anxiety after the first full run-through, two nights before. “I came home and was, like, ‘It’s a mess, it’s a mess!’ ” she said. Heinrichs had handed her a beer and told her, reassuringly, “Remember, it’s just a play.”
Outside the theatre, an old colleague of Chavkin’s, a costume designer who goes by Machine Dazzle, approached, wearing a rainbow-colored sweater.
“Machine!” Chavkin called out. Chavkin’s professional roots are in the weirder reaches of the downtown theatre scene. She and Dazzle had worked together years before, on a five-hour theatre piece written by and starring the avant-garde performance artist Taylor Mac.
“You have to send me one bad thing and one good thing,” Chavkin said.
“I’ll send you two good things and two bad things!” Dazzle said.
Chavkin glanced across the street at the marquee of the Walter Kerr Theatre. For the past five years, the Kerr has been home to “Hadestown,” Chavkin’s biggest commercial success. The show, a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice written by the singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, often plays to sold-out Broadway audiences, and has spawned both a West End production and an ongoing U.S. tour. “Lempicka” ’s publicists had orchestrated a publicity stunt for later in the week to capitalize on her shows’ proximity: in front of the two theatres, the city would hold a ceremony to temporarily rechristen the street Chavkin Way.
“Hadestown” arrived on Broadway shortly after a run in London, where, as Chavkin put it, “the show really became itself.” “Lempicka” had a more halting trajectory. In 2017, Chavkin had planned to stage a revival of a different bio-musical about an artist, the Sondheim classic “Sunday in the Park with George,” about the Pointillist painter Georges Seurat, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. But then she found out that another version, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, was on its way to Broadway. Years before, she’d met Gould and Kreitzer when they were developing “Lempicka” at the Yale Repertory Theatre. Now she called them and proposed taking it to Williamstown. “I was, like, ‘Hi, remember me?’ ” she said. The Williamstown production, in 2018, got a warm review in the Times from Ben Brantley, who called Chavkin a “miracle worker,” and the producers scheduled a pre-Broadway run in California. Then the plan was disrupted by the pandemic. When “Lempicka” finally made it to the La Jolla Playhouse, in 2022, reviews were mixed. A critic at the Times of San Diego wrote that “the show could use more revising, condensing—and heart.” The version coming to Broadway—with a generous $19.2 million capitalization—would be shorter, with retooled choreography and a brand-new set.
Chavkin is unshy about asking what she calls “earthquake questions” about a project, even late in the development process. She often notes that a theatre director’s capacity for problem-solving rests in part on a simple equation: “Time equals the number of choices you get to make.” If there’s time left, then one can still change one’s mind, rethink, correct course. She told me, “It’s not magic how something looks onstage. Someone—a lot of people, actually—made a fuckin’ series of choices, that were based on a million bad choices that then got slightly better.”
Before becoming a Broadway director, Chavkin had what she describes as “zero relationship to Broadway.” She grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, as the only child of two prominent civil-rights lawyers. The culture in the household was intense, intellectual, and obsessed with social justice. “When I was very, very young, I was taught that Ronald Reagan was stealing food from poor children,” Chavkin told me. Her parents waged long legal battles over children’s welfare and health-care access and instilled in Chavkin the value of professional grit. (Her mother, Sara Rosenbaum, recalls advising her daughter, “If you can’t do the fight anymore, you shouldn’t be in it. It should never feel old or dispassionate.”) They also gave Chavkin an early introduction to sophisticated art. She recalled one performance of Bertolt Brecht’s “Threepenny Opera” at the National Theatre: the ballad singer “came out and was showering spit all over the audience. I can remember being just magnetized—the wet and the chaos and the organicness.”
For six summers, beginning in middle school, Chavkin attended Stagedoor Manor, a sleepaway theatre camp in the Catskills, whose notable alumni include Lea Michele, Beanie Feldstein, and Ben Platt. (“I still have mixed feelings about it, because it cost so much money and was such a status game,” Chavkin told me, of the camp. “It is also probably the reason I do what I do today.”) But she was more of a brooding stoner than a show-tunes-obsessed theatre kid, and she was wary of art that she perceived as inauthentic. After high school, she enrolled at the Playwrights Horizons Theatre School, an interdisciplinary wing of N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her favorite class there was an ungraded seminar called Creating Original Work, taught by the modern dancer and choreographer Marleen Pennison, which had only one assignment: to be “interesting alone onstage for ten minutes.” Chavkin became so addicted to the challenge that she took the course three semesters in a row, crafting “hilariously ambitious” pieces such as a character study inspired by a line from the Great Depression tome “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Her idols were experimental theatre companies like the Wooster Group; she considered most Broadway “cheesy.” She told me, “I didn’t want to think about plays that had already been written. I wanted to think about big ideas.”
Playwrights Horizons emphasized the collaborative aspects of theatre-making. After college, while Chavkin was in graduate school for directing, at Columbia, she and five friends from N.Y.U. co-founded a theatre company, the TEAM, with a staunchly anti-hierarchical, consensus-driven process, such that no work could be credited to a single author. Her friend and fellow Playwrights alumnus Jay Sterkel recalled that from early on Chavkin “saw herself as the manager of the people, the keeper of the story. She specifically wanted to occupy that role.” He added, “This group began to coalesce that was like the Rachel Chavkin Players.” But Chavkin took issue with this characterization, which has been a lasting source of tension within the company, she said. She always considered herself an equal in the creative process, she told me, even if, as a director, she was perceived as having a certain “positional power.” (Perhaps tellingly, the name the TEAM—the Theatre of the Emerging American Moment—was both a nod to the group’s collective mind-set and a reference to a college nickname for Chavkin, who liked to wear an old T-shirt from a family fun run that read “Team Chavkin.”) The TEAM’s pieces featured a gleeful cascade of pop-culture references, historical research, and heady tangents about political and social issues: reality TV, teen pregnancy. In 2005, the group brought two shows to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and won an award for up-and-coming companies; they earned the same prize again in 2006 and 2008. The British stage director John Tiffany recalled, “It was so different to any other theatre that I saw coming out of New York. It felt almost more connected to indie filmmaking.”
Chavkin also began collaborating with artists outside the TEAM, including Dave Malloy, the writer and composer of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812.” That musical, based on an excerpt of “War and Peace,” was an immersive “electropop opera” about a naïve socialite (Natasha) and a lonely intellectual (Pierre, originally played by Malloy) in nineteenth-century Moscow on the eve of a looming astronomical event. For the show’s first staging, at the nonprofit theatre Ars Nova, in 2012, Chavkin and her creative team transformed the tiny venue into a Russian night club, with the walls swathed in red velvet and audience members seated at café tables; as the story unfolded, the performers whirled through the crowd delivering bottles of vodka and plates of pierogi. “Comet” became a cult phenomenon and attracted a group of ambitious producers. In 2013, to scale up the production without losing its communal atmosphere, they paid to put up a giant tent to house two runs in vacant Manhattan lots. When “Comet” finally reached Broadway, in 2016, Chavkin and her team retained an unusual degree of rowdy interactivity, in part by seating more than a hundred audience members on the stage.
The director Brian Kulick, one of Chavkin’s mentors at Columbia, told me that there are “forest directors and tree directors”—big-picture people and detail people—and that when he first met Chavkin she was “the best tree director I had ever met. So detailed, so specific, so alive.” She tends to create her most showstopping moments through what she calls “simple gestures.” At the end of “Comet,” a forlorn Pierre (originally played on Broadway by Josh Groban) takes a slow walk on a winter’s night, singing in a single beam of light. But soon the ensemble members, who have scattered throughout the theatre in the dark, begin a chorale underneath his words, and Pierre looks heavenward as a huge, Sputnik-inspired chandelier—the titular great comet—starts to glow, brighter and brighter, until the entire theatre is illuminated. Every member of both the cast and the audience gazes up, too, creating a startling sense of communion between performer and viewer. The director Lear deBessonet told me, “When I go to see one of Rachel’s pieces, I know that I’m going to feel electricity in my body, during these moments of liftoff.” Charles Isherwood, in the Times, called “Comet” “the most innovative and the best new musical to open on Broadway since ‘Hamilton,’ ” and added, with a “heresy alert,” that of the two he preferred “Comet.” The show earned twelve Tony nominations, the most for any production that season, including one for Best Direction. Chavkin said, “We felt like these kids storming the castle.”
For better or worse, the Broadway musical is a genre that favors legibility. Both “Comet” and “Hadestown” feature opening numbers that introduce the cast of characters one by one. (“Gonna have to study up a little bit if you want to keep with the plot,” the “Comet” ensemble sings.) During the first week of “Lempicka” previews, Chavkin told me, of its opening scene, “We’ve heard from people who are kind of confused.” Tamara de Lempicka’s life spanned nearly the entire twentieth century. A half-Jewish upper-class Polish woman, she married into a wealthy Christian family, survived the Bolshevik Revolution, went on to make her name in Paris, painting sensual but hard-edged nudes of women, and then fled the Nazi occupation for Los Angeles, where she lived well into old age. The heart of “Lempicka” was a bisexual love triangle between Tamara; her husband, Tadeusz; and a fictionalized prostitute named Rafaela, based on one of Lempicka’s regular portrait subjects. The opening number churned through years of backstory in less than ten minutes: Tamara marries Tadeusz and has a baby in tsarist Russia, and Tadeusz is arrested during the 1917 Revolution. After Tamara barters her jewels (and, eventually, her body) for Tadeusz’s freedom, the pair decide to flee together to France. To aid the audience on this hectic sprint through history, the show relied on explanatory text projections: “Russia, 1916”; “Night train to Paris.”
There’d been a back-and-forth about whether to slow down the action by including a prologue in which Tamara sits on a park bench in old age and outlines her past. Chavkin had cut the scene in rehearsals, preferring to toss audiences directly into the maelstrom. Now, at the request of Kreitzer, the playwright, a soft-spoken woman with purple hair, Chavkin was considering putting the scene back in, but with a new song—actually an old one, from the La Jolla production. A few days into previews, she texted me, “Girl, we’re totally gonna put back in the old lady top of the show.”
The next Monday, with three weeks to go before the première, Chavkin was at the theatre for a “massive day” of implementing the changes. The auditorium, full of tech equipment, had the look of a NASA control room; by night, it would be cleared out to accommodate audiences. Chavkin was calmly sitting in the center of it all on a “butt board,” a long cushion that lies on top of the theatre seats (“the only way to get through tech,” she said), but she’s an energetic physical presence on set, regularly leaping up to demonstrate her staging ideas. Another day, I saw her take a running jump onto a wooden platform to act out a transition she had in mind, only to trip and fall. Without missing a beat, she laughed and told the performers, “Don’t do that.”
Among Chavkin’s challenges with the opening was a matter of audience allegiances: Tamara’s story invited the audience to root for the aristocrats over the revolutionaries. “Some friends said they weren’t quite sure whose perspective we’re watching,” Chavkin told me. “Obviously, I, for one, really feel for the Bolsheviks, but it’s not their story, and if you don’t know firmly whose story to be oriented toward then the opening is not doing its job.” The prologue wouldn’t exactly resolve the awkward class politics, and it had a whiff of the overfamiliar (the old lady from “Titanic,” the bench scene from “Forrest Gump”), but it would at least help center Tamara in the tale.
Onstage, Eden Espinosa, the forty-six-year-old actor playing Tamara, was sitting on the hotly debated park bench, clutching a cane and wearing a wide-brimmed hat. On a scrim behind her were hazy palm trees and the words “Los Angeles, 1975.” The costume designer, Paloma Young, and two associates fiddled with Espinosa’s satin swing coat. To finesse the transition from the new first scene to the old first scene, Chavkin wanted to execute a dramatic onstage costume change that involved stripping off Tamara’s old-lady outfit onstage to reveal a wedding gown beneath. Chavkin asked, via the “God mike”—a handheld microphone used to communicate with the stage—if they were ready to carry out the quick transformation. “Oh, yeah!” Young said, flashing a thumbs-up.
The new-old number was a wistful song, laced with bitterness. Tamara may look like an “old, eccentric bat,” but she was once an art-world star who “painted what a woman could be.” Chavkin grinned when Espinosa got to the lyric “History’s a bitch, but so am I!” She told me, “I’m so glad we got it back in, because I want it to be on all the merch. Can’t you just see it on a mug?” The existing merchandise featured a minimalist outline of Lempicka’s face. “It is so conservative!” Chavkin said. “They should be selling fucking garter belts that say ‘Lempicka’ on them.” A tagline that the marketing team was using to promote the show was so broad as to be opaque: “All she ever wanted was everything.”
Owing to union rules, rehearsal had to wrap at four-thirty. Chavkin sang a little ditty to herself: “There’s never enough tiiime.” Espinosa looked weary. “Lempicka,” which she’d joined early in its development, was her first Broadway role in more than a decade and was, as Chavkin put it, “fucking unforgiving.” Espinosa had to sing big and belty in nearly every scene. Now, after rehearsing some new choreography with the whole cast, she walked to the front of the stage shaking her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, softly. “But this is a lot, because everyone’s on different beats, and on different words.”
Chavkin nodded warmly, taking this in. “Ensemble, how are you feeling?” she asked over the mike. One chorus member suggested that just the dancers do the new steps for the next performance, and Chavkin seemed pleased by the temporary solution.
With five minutes left, the stage manager asked if she wanted to run the number one more time. “Yeah, baby!” Chavkin said, triumphantly kicking out one leg. As others were flagging, she seemed to be gaining steam. A few days later, she texted me that they were pulling the opening scene apart all over again.
When I first met Chavkin, in 2019, “Hadestown” had just won eight Tonys, including Best Direction of a Musical, and Chavkin had become something of a theatre-world cause célèbre after using her acceptance speech to point out that no other Broadway musical that season had been directed by a woman. (“This is not a pipeline issue,” she said. “It is a failure of imagination.”) Like “Comet,” “Hadestown” managed to maintain the scrappy feel of downtown theatre in an uptown space. Anaïs Mitchell’s poetic score, which was previously released as a folk concept album, is far earthier than standard Broadway fare; the boisterous band plays directly onstage. The show opens with the narrator, the messenger god Hermes, initiating a call-and-response with the audience to invoke a myth-making space: “All right?” “All right!” (Chavkin said, “I generally don’t believe in the fourth wall.”) The playwright Bess Wohl, one of Chavkin’s regular collaborators, told me, “I so often see women directors’ work being compared to the theatrical equivalent of needlepoint—small and delicate.” Chavkin, she went on, favors the “brash and huge and messy.”
In one conversation, Chavkin mentioned that Guggenheim fellowships are not awarded to theatre directors, on the ground that their work is to interpret, not generate. “Interpretive art is generative,” she said, adding, “You change the meaning of something depending on how you deliver it.” Still, directors, like editors of written stories, must work with the raw material they’re given, and the raw material of “Lempicka” was in some ways an unnatural match for Chavkin. Structurally and sonically, the musical hewed to Broadway convention. Gould, the composer, told me that he wrote the score in the spirit of sprawling eighties blockbuster musicals. “I’ve been calling this show ‘Lez Miz,’ ” he joked. The set, designed by Riccardo Hernández, was sleek and mechanical, with what Chavkin calls “whizbangs,” including fly-in triangular screens and an Eiffel Toweresque jungle gym of light-up staircases. Chavkin, however, told me that she saw the production’s traditional elements as “drag,” under cover of which to “smuggle a nuanced, queer narrative onto Broadway.”
“Lempicka” places itself in dialogue with “Sunday in the Park with George”—“Woman is plane, color, light,” Tamara sings, echoing Sondheim’s famous song “Color and Light.” But the two musicals take very different approaches to the art at their center. “Sunday,” cerebral and meticulous, makes a case for Seurat’s rigorous and somewhat chilly compositions; the subject and the form of the show align, bringing, as Sondheim puts it in George’s first song, “order to the whole.” In “Lempicka,” the art and the animating ideas are at odds. The women in Tamara’s portraits look inscrutable and machinelike, as if they’ve been slicked over by a Zamboni. Her mantra in the show is “Never let them see your brushstrokes,” a principle that she applies both to her paintings and to her personal life. But the story’s goal is to expose a crosshatching of experiences beneath the varnish—aging, trauma, persecution, dislocation. Living honestly, the musical ultimately argues, means letting one’s brushstrokes show. Chavkin told me, “Mess is queerness. Mess is anti-establishment. Mess is truth.”
Perhaps accordingly, the musical favored a clash of visual styles that sometimes left the production feeling disjointed and overstuffed. The choreography, by Raja Feather Kelly, leaned on references to Madonna, who is a collector of Lempicka’s art and projects her paintings during arena concerts. Ensemble members in cone bustiers vogued across the stage. A synth-heavy number about futurism was wildly entertaining but felt ported in from a Depeche Mode music video. My favorite parts of the production traded such winking anachronisms for louche prewar glamour. In one stand-out scene, Tamara and Rafaela visit a clandestine lesbian bar and lounge among tuxedoed women. A pink velvet banquette emerges out of a clamshell-shaped trapdoor that Chavkin described as a “vagina in the floor.” As “Comet” had done with a sliver of “War and Peace,” the scene made its esoteric particulars feel wholly enveloping.
Chavkin is not usually inclined toward sentimental story lines. “Unsentimentality is the real beauty,” she told me. But “Lempicka” promised to be, among everything else, a big, tragic romance. Throughout the development process, Chavkin and her team struggled to build an emotional armature that could support Tamara’s two competing love stories. A triangle needs three strong sides, and it was hard to believe that Tadeusz, who is jobless and adrift in Paris, could hold Tamara’s affection as powerfully as the charismatic Rafaela, played by the scene-stealing alto Amber Iman. They’d tried to make Tadeusz more appealing, removing a scene of him striking Tamara and adding dialogue in which he admits he’s been “a bit of a shit” about her painting career. One day, during rehearsals, Andrew Samonsky, the actor playing Tadeusz, told Chavkin, “I’m feeling a bit lost, just because of all the versions. I’m trying to calibrate who he is.” Chavkin came up with the idea of having Tadeusz don a three-piece suit as he sang his solo number—“putting on armor,” she called it.
A few days before the première, Chavkin and I spoke by phone. She seemed to be anticipating, perhaps a bit defensively, all the reasons that critics might dismiss “Lempicka” out of hand—“ ‘Too big.’ ‘Another bio-pic.’ ‘Too queer.’ ” She added, “I think the show is quite profound, and there’s the terror of, Will that be seen? Will it be seen for the wonder that I think it is?”
Chavkin and Heinrichs bought a two-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, seventeen years ago, when they earned less than sixty thousand dollars a year combined. They still live there today, although the commute to Times Square is long, and as a Broadway director she is now well compensated. (For the sake of pay transparency, she told me that the year “Hadestown” opened and became a hit she made more than eight hundred thousand dollars. “I want this to be very much on the record,” she told me, “because no one talks enough about money.”) When I went over to her apartment for dinner one night in February, she pulled a tub of soup out of the fridge and asked me to sniff it to make sure it “hadn’t gone funky,” then tasked me with heating it up in the microwave. In the dining room, Chavkin’s Tony Award for “Hadestown” was wedged on the cluttered top of a tall wooden cabinet. A spindly chandelier—one of a number of smaller lights used on the set of “Comet”—hovered elegantly, but the table beneath was nearly invisible under a sea of papers and books. Rather than try to make space, Chavkin asked if I would mind sitting on the living-room floor.
Chavkin conducts her personal life with the same collaborative ethos that she brings to the theatre. In 2019, she agreed to serve as a surrogate for her best friends, a gay artist couple who live in Texas. At the time, she and Heinrichs were leaning toward not having children, in part because Heinrichs’s father died of hereditary Alzheimer’s. In an essay for Vogue, she recalled that getting pregnant involved some “ferrying of sperm-filled syringes around my flat” during the London run of “Hadestown.” When the baby was born—also on Chavkin’s floor—the daddies, as she calls them, temporarily relocated to an apartment upstairs that Chavkin rents. They moved back to Texas a year later, and Chavkin realized that she wanted a child of her own. She and Heinrichs had a son, Sam, in 2021, and she considers the children long-distance family. Heinrichs’s sister, Liz, now lives in the upstairs apartment and helps to care for Sam, an arrangement that allows Chavkin to work marathon rehearsal days and late nights at the theatre. “It all sounds complicated, but it really isn’t,” Chavkin told me. “Or maybe it is just the kind of complicated that I like.”
“Lempicka” is not Chavkin’s first Broadway production to meet a difficult end. “Comet” struggled to sustain itself commercially despite its critical acclaim. The cast was among the largest on Broadway at the time, and the show was expensive to maintain. After the better part of a year, Josh Groban left the cast and sales plummeted. In July of 2017, the “Hamilton” alum Okieriete Onaodowan assumed the role of Pierre, but the producers cut his run short to allow the veteran theatre actor Mandy Patinkin to do a special engagement, hoping that his star power would revive sales. Instead, the change caused a scandal when an organization called Broadway Black criticized the decision, prompting a wave of social-media outrage, and Patinkin promptly backed out. Weathering what Chavkin called a “shitstorm” of bad publicity, “Comet” abruptly announced a closing date.
Chavkin has learned, in other public ways, that the hazards of working in the commercial theatre are political as well as artistic. She is known for casting diversely and for recruiting new talent, but she has also faced complaints about workplace equity. During the reckonings of summer, 2020, a Black costume designer who’d worked on “Lempicka” in Williamstown but wasn’t kept on posted an Instagram video (later deleted) alleging unfair treatment. Chavkin publicly apologized, and afterward hired an “anti-oppressionist” leadership coach with whom she continues to work. (Last year, a performer from “Hadestown” sued the production for racial discrimination and retaliation. The racial-discrimination claims were dismissed on First Amendment grounds, but the retaliation claims are still pending.) Amber Gray, a mixed-race actress and TEAM member who played the original Persephone in Chavkin’s “Hadestown,” told me that her relationship with Chavkin has grown strained over time owing to issues of compensation. As the director, Chavkin receives royalties; as an actor, Gray does not. Chavkin told me that she plans to share her royalties with the show’s original Broadway leads, but that she has faced bureaucratic hurdles in doing so. Gray said, “I think some of her morals and ethics—there’s not space for them in those commercial machines.” Still, she gave Chavkin credit for trying to put her ideals into practice in a “yucky, antiquated” system. “Commercial theatre is not about camaraderie. It’s not about the art. It is about making money,” Gray said, adding, “That eats people alive.”
There are feast and famine years on Broadway. The glut of new productions this season—thirty-nine, including twenty-one musicals—belies the fact that audiences’ appetite for the theatre has yet to recover from the pandemic; as of March, Broadway attendance is down seventeen per cent from pre-Covid levels. According to Forbes, only about a quarter of Broadway shows become commercial hits even in a good year. Jack Viertel, a theatre producer and the author of “The Secret Life of the American Musical,” told me that, given the competitive current conditions, “Lempicka,” lacking instant name recognition or celebrity stunt casting, “couldn’t have opened at a worse time.” From the first week of previews, its financial outlook was dire. Tickets were priced modestly, and, though the theatre was mostly full each night, it was bringing in only in the ballpark of four hundred thousand dollars a week, nowhere near what it needed to recoup its costs. The show badly needed the buy-in of critics, or a sudden surge in word-of-mouth fandom.
On opening night, April 14th, Chavkin walked the red carpet wearing silk Rachel Comey pants in the same shade of emerald as Lempicka used in her self-portrait “Tamara in the Green Bugatti.” There was an after-party at the ritzy Metropolitan Club, which was “fun, until it was less fun,” Chavkin told me. Reviews had started to appear shortly after curtain call. Jesse Green, of the Times, praised Espinosa and Iman’s vocal acrobatics but likened the Bolsheviks scene to “an anemic ‘Les Miz’ ” and wrote that the show lacked “subtlety, complexity and historical precision.” (The review’s headline twisted the knife: “It’s No Sunday in the Park with ‘Lempicka.’ ”) Sara Holdren, of New York, a former theatre director herself, wrote, “The show pushes and poses—it doesn’t let us in.” Chavkin said that she spent the end of the after-party sitting with Gould, going “down the spiral.” Dave Malloy and Anaïs Mitchell were there, and they attempted to cheer Chavkin up by belting “Thunder Road” with her on the building’s marble steps. By the next week, the fate of “Lempicka” was uncertain. Chavkin told me, “Now I just live with a low-level sense of doom.” She was quick to note that, if “Lempicka” closed, the worst effects would be felt among the cast and crew, who would suddenly be out of a job. Her next directing project, a musical adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” with a score co-written by the British rock star Florence Welch, had already started rehearsals for an out-of-town première in Boston.
One night in late April, I went with Chavkin to see “The Outsiders,” a new Broadway musical based on S. E. Hinton’s young-adult novel, which Francis Ford Coppola adapted into a film in 1983. The show had opened three days before “Lempicka,” also to mixed reviews, but was faring well in ticket sales. Its thirty-five-year-old director, Chavkin’s friend Danya Taymor—the niece of Julie Taymor, the director of “The Lion King” and one of Chavkin’s early heroes—was making her Broadway-musical directorial début.
“The Outsiders,” about warring gangs of teen-age boys in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a crowd-pleaser, with a breezy, if forgettable, score and a cast full of peppy (and in one case shirtless) youths. But its stagecraft is inventive and mature. During intermission, Chavkin noted that one climactic maneuver, featuring two boys leaping onto a moving train with swinging flashlights lighting their way, had echoes of a stunning moment in “Hadestown” when Orpheus travels to the underworld and five large, low-hanging lamps sway out over the audience in perfect unison. “Not in a derivative way,” she hastened to add. “They are talking to each other.” She walked over to Taymor, who was standing near the front of the stage. “It’s so fucking good,” Chavkin said, squeezing Taymor on the shoulder.
Afterward, on a car ride back to Brooklyn, Chavkin stared out the window. “I often felt, with the Team, that we were too warm or emotional or whatnot for downtown,” she said. “And then, uptown, I feel very welcomed, but also often have felt like my taste doesn’t align with a lot of what gets celebrated or sustained.” She went on, “I won’t speak to this season at all, for a number of reasons, but in previous seasons I will see stuff and I will just be, like, I don’t understand. I am genuinely confused by what ‘good’ is. It’s something about the comfort of the familiar, when what I’ve always been most exhilarated by is, I’ve never seen that before.”
All the great Broadway directors swing and miss. Julie Taymor’s “Spider-Man” musical was a notorious disaster. Hal Prince had seven flops in a row, beginning with “Merrily We Roll Along,” then made “The Phantom of the Opera.” “Gatsby” is expected to eventually transfer to Broadway, but Chavkin said that she’s eager to get back to making “weird shit” downtown, and that her financial security from “Hadestown” has given her the privilege of being choosy. She continues to consider the TEAM a “spiritual home base.” A project the ensemble has been working on for many years, about the interpersonal legacy of slavery, co-directed by Chavkin and Zhailon Levingston, is scheduled to finish workshopping at BAM in the fall. At the same time, Chavkin is developing her first Hollywood project—a period film about a punk band—with the encouragement of Steven Spielberg, who, after seeing “Hadestown,” told her that she thinks like a filmmaker.
The “Gatsby” closing number features the character of Nick Carraway singing Fitzgerald’s famous final line: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Like “Gatsby,” all three of Chavkin’s Broadway musicals end tragically, but with a sense that something vital has been gleaned from the heartache. In “Hadestown,” after Orpheus fails to rescue Eurydice from Hades—and she falls back into the underworld, via a mechanism that descends beneath the stage—Hermes starts the story over from the top, saying that they will “sing it again.” The cast then performs an epilogue, downstage and without microphones, after they’ve taken their bows. In a book about the making of the show, Anaïs Mitchell writes that Chavkin “felt that the audience needed a final moment together, with the Company, to fully process.” In “Lempicka,” Tamara’s art is rediscovered late in her life, but she is still haunted by her personal losses. For most of the musical, Lempicka’s paintings are depicted only as digital projections or as empty frames onstage. But, in the final minutes, huge reproductions lower from the ceiling and fill the stage with their jewel tones. “We do not control the world. We control one flat rectangle of canvas at a time,” Tamara sings, and—in a lovely “simple gesture”—a “blue-out” of milky sapphire light swallows the stage.
The day after we saw “The Outsiders,” the Boston run of “Gatsby” was extended owing to advance demand. The following week, the Tony nominations were announced. “Lempicka” got three nods, including one for Espinosa as Best Actress, but it didn’t get Best Musical, and Chavkin was passed over for Best Direction. On May 2nd, Chavkin texted me, “We’re about to post a closing notice.”
The surge of attention that “Lempicka” needed did arrive, too late. In its last weeks, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Rosie O’Donnell went to see it and posted praise on social media. Madonna slipped into the penultimate performance, wearing huge black sunglasses. A crowd of mostly young and queer fans—Lempeople, they’d taken to calling themselves—camped out in long lines for rush tickets. On closing day, outside the Longacre, a Lemperson named Lauren Cagnetta was dressed in a pink T-shirt emblazoned with Espinosa’s face. Cagnetta was seeing the show for the thirty-third time. A twentysomething named Sam Bash sported a fanny pack covered in homemade “Lempicka” buttons. “Shows are short,” Bash said, tearily. “But art is long.”
Inside the theatre, the mood was raucous. When Espinosa took her place on the bench, the audience erupted. Several numbers got a standing ovation, causing the show to run overtime. The cast, feeding off the energy in the room, seemed newly confident, their performances rawer and more lived in. At intermission, a man sitting behind me, who identified himself as a stage director, described “Lempicka” as the “tragedy of this Broadway season.” He went on, “If you don’t have original shows, you can’t have revivals in twenty years. Nobody revives jukebox musicals.” After the final bows, the cast and the core creative team lingered onstage to deliver speeches. Their tone was defiant, their narrative neat: the show had simply been misunderstood. Kreitzer, noting that a cast album would be out shortly, quoted Tennessee Williams from “Orpheus Descending”: “Wild things leave skins behind them.”
Once the audience had shuffled out of the theatre, the crew strung caution tape across the stage. The next day, demolition of the set would begin. Chavkin sat alone in the orchestra section until the house went dark and only a single ghost light illuminated the stage. “It was different tonight,” she said. In its final moments, “Lempicka” had acquired the kind of abandon that Chavkin’s best work is known for. “The cast found more space. It got more complicated, and craggy. You know, when you’re first making the machine of a show, it can feel very polished. But my favorite part has always been the cracks.” ♦
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