This story is featured in CityBeat’s May 17 print edition.
The touring production of one of Broadway’s most spectacular recent shows, Moulin Rouge! The Musical, is in Cincinnati for three weeks. The show opened on Broadway in July 2019. It shut down during the pandemic but came back strong when Broadway reopened, winning 10 Tony Awards in 2021, including Best Musical. It’s still running in New York City, racking up more than 900 performances so far.
The show is an onstage adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s hit film from 2001. Recreating that dazzling cinematic experience that featured Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, Jim Broadbent and John Leguizamo was a big challenge, but it has been clearly met by scenic designer Derek McLane, who won a Tony Award for the show’s set designs.
McLane earned the design assignment in 2018. He had seen the 2001 movie and was struck by Catherine Martin’s spectacular design work, which earned Academy Awards for both Best Production Design and Best Costume Design. “I remember being in awe,” McLane told CityBeat, “just struck by the whole view of the world in that movie and how it was shot. I did not go back and watch it as I began to work on the design because I really wanted to come up with my own version. But there were certain things I remembered vividly that I thought I should pay homage to in my design.” After he did his initial design, he watched the film again. “There were a couple of things that I picked up on in the movie, but when you actually look at the movie and our show side-by-side, they are very different.”
McLane met with Martin and her husband, Luhrmann, who directed the movie. “They’re very much creative collaborators on all their projects [including La Bohème on Broadway in 2002 and 2003], and she was incredibly gracious and generous. I showed my design to her and Baz for their input, and they’ve been amazing from start to finish.”
McLane called the movie “iconographic in terms of its design. That put a certain amount of pressure on me because I was keenly aware that I did not want to disappoint the movie’s many fans. Knowing that it had to be different for the stage, I still needed to meet their expectations. I also wanted to surprise people and not just do a faithful adaptation. That was the aesthetic challenge for me.
“When you enter the theater for our production you feel like you are going into the Moulin Rouge,” McLane said. “That’s partly the visuals of what you see, and there’s also the music you hear when you go in. The show really does take you on a journey, which is really exciting in the theater when that happens. But that journey starts the minute you walk in the auditorium. It’s a lovely, transportive experience.”
The legendary 19th-century nightclub at the foot of Paris’s Montmartre hill was frequented by a broad spectrum of Parisian society, from ordinary folks to wealthy foreigners and avant garde artists. The fashionable but bohemian venue offered exotic and varied performances by singers, dancers and acrobats. Many acts became famous, especially the ribald French “cancan” with a kick line and high-flying petticoats, which was an instant sensation.
For his stage design, McLane created “a series of heart-shaped portals onstage. Versions of those exist in the movie, but they’re quite different, and you don’t see them for very long. You see much more of them in our production. They’re more detailed in our show production than in the movie because they weren’t such a big part of the movie.” He also designed a heart-shaped window for the apartment of Satine (the role of a star singer played by Kidman in the extravagant movie). Working closely with the show’s director Alex Timbers, McLane said, “I tried to capture a lot of the energy and anarchy of the movie. But obviously, we’re on stage, and we had to do it in a totally different way than it’s done on film.
“In the movie, there were these really crazy edit things, panning shots,” McLane pointed out. “That’s a part of the energy of the film. You obviously can’t do that onstage. You can’t move scenery that fast, and you don’t have a moving camera since the audience is sitting in their seats. One of the ways we tried to do that is that just about everything in the set lights up in one way or another. Sometimes it has a little bit of the energy of a pinball machine. The scenery can’t move the way it does in the movie, but the lighting can. By embedding so much lighting in the scenery — light bulbs and neon and things like that — it gives you something to make radically different looks from within a song. That also helps create the insanity that is part of the show.”
The show’s opening sequence immediately cranks up the energy with music from the film but also more contemporary numbers. It’s a mashup of tunes by Patti LaBelle (“Lady Marmalade”), OutKast (“So Fresh, So Clean”), Barrett Strong (“Money, That’s What I Want”), David Bowie (“Let’s Dance”), The Talking Heads (“Burning Down the House”) and Fatboy Slim (“Because We Can”).
“It’s a lot of music,” McLane said. “Sonya Tayeh did a lot of amazing choreography, so there’s a lot of movement. And a lot of lighting cues. I think it’s pretty exciting.” He also cites the choreography and lighting at the beginning of the second act, which kicks off with Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance.” “It’s just such incredibly high energy that I get a thrill every time I see it.”
Moulin Rouge! The Musical, presented by Broadway in Cincinnati, will run May 17-June 4 at the Aronoff Center for the Arts, 650 Walnut St., Downtown. Info: cincinnati.broadway.com.
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This article appears in May 3-16, 2023.
