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- "Moulin Rouge!" is this past season's
most-honored show at the Tony Awards.
You can see it right now in New York
and starting next month,
the tour of "Moulin Rouge!" is hitting the road.
Broadway.com correspondent, Beth Stevens
caught up with director Alex Timbers
in this edition of Building Broadway.
- So here we are here. - Here we are.
- At the Hirschfeld Theater
and we're in a kind of an unusual room,
where are we?
- We are in, I think what Jujamcyn
calls the VIP Lounge.
So we're both very fancy people for this afternoon only.
This is where we would do a lot of production meetings
and I think where people can come during intermission
and have a drink.
- When people walk into "Moulin Rouge!,"
I noticed that conversation stops
and people look around the theater
and they ooh and they ah.
- Yes. - Is that something
that you wanted to happen?
- Ever since that first preview in Boston,
I love to stand closer to the stage
and watch people come in
right at 7:15 when they let people in
and you just see these jaws drop
when they see Derek's work and Justin Townsend's lighting,
it's extraordinary and you know, they're transported.
From moment one the theatrical envelope
wanted to be the club.
- Let's talk more about that envelope
because like I said when you walk into the theater,
you're completely immersed into this different world.
Tell me about some of the discussions you had
with your collaborators.
- Derek McLane did this set
and Cathy Zuber did the costumes
and from moment one, we wanted the elements to be period,
but to be kind of reorganized and juxtaposed
in ways that might feel contemporary or surprising.
So that was one of the things that really governed us.
We wanted the experience to be democratic,
we wanted, if you're sitting in the last row of the balcony
to feel like you surrounded by that world,
it wasn't just the world of the stage
or world for you know, the people sitting in house seats
that it, there were runways or ramps that
performers could pop up next to you at any point.
We want it to feel luxurious,
we want it to feel like an incredible nightclub,
like an incredible theatrical space
where that felt dangerous and exotic and enticing.
The Moulin Rouge that didn't exist,
but you kind of dreamed of existing.
- What was your approach to the storytelling?
- Baz was an incredible sort of theater maker
before he was an incredible filmmaker
and so he was very open to the idea of saying
this is an adaptation,
this has to have different needs and rules
the theatrical form will take,
it's a musical.
And so we went through the process
once John Logan was hired as the book writer
and Justin Levine as the music supervisor
and, you know, went into a hotel room,
I dragged my girlfriend's keyboard into there
and we sat there and we had note cards
and we sort of said okay, let's, rebreak the story.
And we said, how do we make the love triangle more dynamic?
How do we make this more dangerous?
How do we raise the stakes here and there?
Just what does the form demand?
It felt like you were breaking you know
any other original musical as opposed to adapting one
of the great movie musicals of all time.
Sonya Tayeh came in, amazing choreographer
and started, you know, workshopping dancer,
saying like, let me try this idea.
She has this group of dancers she works with
and in different rehearsal studios all over New York.
So all this stuff's happening simultaneously
while we're developing the design
and everything's sort of feeding into each other.
- You're very good at bringing in
pop culture and Broadway.
- One of the things that I really care about
is as someone who loves theater
and is an advocate of theater
and an evangelist of theater
is when theater feels like it's in dialogue
with popular culture and popular music.
I remember the first show that hooked me so hard was Tommy
and seeing music video visuals on stage,
a score that connected with people
who love musical theater,
who have thought they didn't love musical theater
until that moment
and that's the stuff that really gets me excited.
- What are you most proud of when it comes to Moulin Rouge?
- I think the thing I'm most proud of is the collaboration.
I think the idea that you've got someone like John Logan
who writes plays and writes these incredible
like elevated genre movies, like Alien and Skyfall
and then you've got Sonya from the world of concert dance
and you've got Aaron Tveit,
you know, one of the great musical theater performers
and Robyn Hurder, like an amazing like Fosse interpreter
and that they all fit into this world
and work well seamlessly together
that feels to me like something that I find
aspirational as a director.
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