ADVERTISEMENT

Moulin Rouge!, That Old Paris Courtesan, Looks Lovelier Than Ever

“More” is the mantra of the Moulin Rouge. It’s what audiences will expect when the show opens on July 25.

Moulin Rouge!, That Old Paris Courtesan, Looks Lovelier Than Ever
McLane’s set is bathed in red velvet and punctuated by mismatched chandeliers. A catwalk encloses the first few rows of seating, which are cafe-style to evoke the 1899 nightclub. Photographer: Monique Carboni  

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- A giant, bedazzled elephant peers down onto designer Derek McLane as he surveys his set for the highly anticipated Broadway adaptation of Moulin Rouge!, Baz Luhrmann’s dazzling 2001 pop-opera film. Opposite the pachyderm, the eponymous red windmill spins lazily, while in between, a massive heart portal frames the stage in seemingly infinite, ornately latticed layers. The scene is an assault of scarlet and gold that has transformed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre into fin de siècle Paris’s most notorious den of iniquity.

“There’s honestly so much,” McLane says approvingly. But he wants more: more sconces, more drapes—“to make it look a little more elegant”—though every available inch of the theater appeared to already be smothered in myriad varietals of red velvet and satin.

Yet “more” is the mantra of the Moulin Rouge, and maximalist grandeur is what turned the film’s jagged quirkiness into a flamboyant fantasia. It’s what audiences will expect when the show opens on July 25, a deadline McLane is scrambling to meet. “Once you get into this level of detail,” he says, “It’s hard to finish.”

Moulin Rouge!, That Old Paris Courtesan, Looks Lovelier Than Ever

When the doors to the $28 million Moulin Rouge! musical open, the show will be the latest in an endless, exhausting line of screen-to-stage adaptations hoping to conquer Broadway. Yet few arrive with such inherent theatrical DNA and a strong aesthetic identity already in place (Catherine Martin won an Oscar for her set design of the film and another for the costumes). McLane, who nabbed a Tony for his design on 2009’s 33 Variations, says he was “sort of stunned” by the visuals of the film. “I had never seen anything like it in a movie before.”

Translating Luhrmann’s frenzied music-video style onto the stagnant stage was the big conceptual question. Early on, director Alex Timbers proposed: “What if we invested in really making the theater—the minute the audience walks in—feel like you’re in the club?” Rather than spastic editing, dynamic design would give the story its thrilling rush and modern swagger (along with Timbers’s brisk staging and explosive choreography by Sonya Tayeh). Says Timbers: “We needed someone who could transform a theater into an intoxicatingly beautiful and immersive club, and Derek was the perfect person for that.”

The Moulin Rouge performance hall, which opened in 1889 (the same year the Eiffel Tower was completed) and gave birth to the “can-can” dance, welcomed high-kicking courtesans, artists, and aristocrats alike. Now New York audiences are invited to join the demimonde. In McLane’s vision, thousands of light bulbs studded among the curtains cast sinister shadows while a dozen mis-matched chandeliers sparkle overhead. All this, McLane explains, nods to the club’s desperate attempt to project luxury and sophistication while it sold sex and teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. “It’s glorious but cheap,” he says.

Moulin Rouge!, That Old Paris Courtesan, Looks Lovelier Than Ever
Moulin Rouge!, That Old Paris Courtesan, Looks Lovelier Than Ever

Down below, a pit of cabaret tables (for brave voyeurs) looks up the skirt of the stage, surrounded by a catwalk where, at the top of the show, the dancers known as the Diamond Dogs beckon the audience with an amped-up rendition of Lady Marmalade. The story that unfolds from there has been retooled by book writer John Logan, known for film scripts such as Gladiator and The Aviator. Logan’s additions fill in the emotional backstory of the central couple—the courtesan Satine (Karen Olivo here, Nicole Kidman in the film) and wide-eyed poet Christian (now Aaron Tveit, formerly Ewan MacGregor).

Moulin Rouge!, That Old Paris Courtesan, Looks Lovelier Than Ever

They also include new scenes, tweaked characters (i.e., a hunkier Duke), and incorporate more than a dozen of today’s hit songs from such artists as Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, and Sia, in addition to the 1980s and 90’s hits favored by the film. (The show incorporates a dizzying total of 70 pop songs.)

“We were looking for someone who could handle the spectacle side of Moulin Rouge! but also help create the more intimate environments we were looking for to ground the show,” says lead producer Carmen Pavlovic. “A fun thing to look out for are all of the windmills Derek has incorporated around the venue. They are dotted around light fixtures, on walls, and even molded into the decorative boxes at the front of the stage.”

In the design as in the story, the challenge was reminding viewers why they fell in love with the film but also giving them a fresh experience. “There are things I wanted to honor, or quote, or riff on,” McLane says of the film, pointing to the imagery of the windmill, elephant, and hearts. But “at the end of the day, I’m designing the script that John Logan wrote.”

Moulin Rouge!, That Old Paris Courtesan, Looks Lovelier Than Ever

McLane’s path to Moulin Rouge! began in 1976 with a summer of building houses before he started at Harvard. When someone there learned of his construction experience, he was asked to build out a student production and was soon designing sets of his own, including some for a classmate named Peter Sellars. “He introduced me to avant-garde theater,” McLane says of the globally renowned director, “and pushed me to do some cool things,” such as a stainless-steel set for a production of King Lear with a Lincoln Continental at centerstage.

After attending graduate school at Yale, McLane spent nearly a decade designing at regional theaters across the country—sometimes 10 to 12 shows a year. “You had to do that many just to feed yourself.” But he values the experience for the opportunity to experiment and fail outside of the scrutiny of New York. A big break came when he designed the Moises Kaufman-directed play I Am My Own Wife in 2003. “That was the first time I got to develop my own voice as a designer,” McLane says. Since then, his Broadway credits have mounted (among them, Ragtime and Follies), along with television gigs (Hairspray Live!) that include several years designing the stage for the Academy Awards, which won him one of two Emmys.

Moulin Rouge!, That Old Paris Courtesan, Looks Lovelier Than Ever

But Moulin Rouge! is the culmination of many threads of his biography and interests. “From the minute I heard about it, I thought, ‘I have to do this project,’” he says. “This is so my wheelhouse.” That includes the setting, in belle époque France, an era he adores. (He also visited that period for 2015’s Gigi on Broadway.) The fact that Orientalism was all the rage in European cultural circles at the time, with artists drawing inspiration from (well, appropriating) Eastern cultures such as India and China is an element that has long intrigued McLane, who lived in Calcutta for two years as a child while his father, a Northwestern professor, was on a research sabbatical.

Moulin Rouge!, That Old Paris Courtesan, Looks Lovelier Than Ever

Now he’s mashed it all together on stage, with elegance and grandeur and a pinch of the avant-garde—a process, he says, that has “definitely pushed me and stretched me.” The result feels less like a set than a venue redesign, the metamorphosis of a Broadway house into the lavish, naughty nightclub of a near-mythical yesteryear, an homage to a sui generis film, yet still a world of its own.

But not quite: There are still more curtains to be hung.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Chris Rovzar at crovzar@bloomberg.net

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.