Mixing and matching songs makes ‘Moulin Rouge!’ pop
“Music is the lifeblood of that movie because the emotions are larger than life,” says director Alex Timbers of “Moulin Rouge!,” Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film that helped revive Hollywood’s movie-musical genre. When he was approached by Luhrmann about helming a stage adaptation of the frenetic film, Timbers jumped at the chance to build a dazzling world of opulent sets, breathtaking costumes, and high-voltage dance numbers to tell the doomed love story of a Parisian nightclub chanteuse Satine and brooding American writer Christian during the Belle Époque.
Yet what really got Timbers’s neurons firing was the film’s exuberant use of pop songs, including some ingenious mash-ups and medleys, and the chance to create a fresh score by mining both the contemporary and classic pop canon, from current artists like Beyoncé, Adele, Rihanna, Lady Gaga, and Sia, to retro bands like T. Rex, Talking Heads, the Eurythmics, and the Rolling Stones.
The stage version of “Moulin Rouge!” premiered at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in 2018 and then moved to Broadway the following year, where it captured 10 Tony Awards, including for best musical. Now the touring production, presented by Broadway in Boston, can-cans its way into the Citizens Bank Opera House for a three-week run beginning Tuesday.
When Timbers, book writer John Logan, and music supervisor and orchestrator Justin Levine gathered to sketch out the spine of their adaptation, they had decades’ worth of pop songs to consider — if they could obtain the rights. They had to expand the score to encompass the fleshed-out “La Boheme”-style romance and its array of colorful bohemian characters, including nightclub impresario Harold Zidler and painter Toulouse-Lautrec. That meant finding newer pop songs that had been released since the film’s debut but also digging into previous eras and seeking out different genres, like jazz and Latin music. The score now includes more than 70 songs encompassing some 160 songwriters.
Levine had to fit and fuse all the music together, rewrite some lyrics, and lead the effort to obtain rights clearances for the songs. The choices were guided, first and foremost, by the storytelling.
“If you try to make it too much about what’s hot in the moment, you’re shortening the shelf life and the appeal of the show,” Levine cautions. “I would often attempt to win an argument about a [potential] song by saying, ‘This is a song of the summer right now, whereas this other song has been played at weddings for the last 20 years.’ ”
A hallmark of the film was its frenzied cinematography — the jump cuts, the rushing and swooping camera pans, and Steadicam shots — but live theater is a different medium, with different compositional tools. “Music was a great opportunity to translate the cinematography and madcap style of the film,” Levine says. “To create a similar effect as a spinning camera that’s rolling through the Montmartre [neighborhood of Paris], you can have sequences with a big swirling medley or a high-octane dance break.”
The musical maintains some of the film’s key songs. It opens with the memorable mash-up of “Lady Marmalade” and Fatboy Slim’s “Because We Can,” with added tunes like Talking Heads’ “Burning Down the House” thrown into the mix. Christian and Satine still croon “Your Song” and “Come What May” to each other. And a jealous Christian sings “El Tango de Roxanne” after Zidler warns him about the pitfalls of loving a courtesan like Satine, whose sparkling entrance features the movie’s mash-up of Madonna’s “Material Girl” and “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” with “Diamonds Are Forever” and Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” adding new notes.
For the new material, Levine reshaped Katy Perry’s soaring anthem “Firework,” sung by Satine, into a power-ballad with a slowed-down tempo. The second act opens with Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” blended with Britney Spears’s “Toxic” and the Eurythmics’
“Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).”
The electrifying “Elephant Love Medley,” in which Christian confesses his love for Satine and tries to convince her that they should be together, was rejiggered for the stage version. The 20song number boasts the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” and David Bowie’s “Heroes,” all featured in the film, but it relay-races through a slew of new songs in between.
Pop songs are all about the melodic hooks and communicating a feeling. They don’t typically have arcs like musical theater songs, where a story is advanced or a character makes a discovery. “In a musical, you want the refrain to have new meaning every time you hear it,” Timbers says. “So in this show, that meant truncating a song and making it verse-chorus-bridge-chorus, or that meant putting two songs together so it creates even more meaning, or using counterpart — two characters singing the same chorus but it means different things.”
Timbers cites the mash-up of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and Gnarls Barkley’s
“Crazy,” the show’s 11 o’clock number, as an example of how context, a character’s point-of-view, and slight alterations to the lyrics can create new, more complex meaning. “When Satine sings her parts, it has a level of pathos and tragedy to it, and when Christian sings his, it has a level of rage,” Timbers says. “The same lyric split among them can service completely different character arcs.”
Luhrmann originally wanted to weave a Rolling Stones song into the film but couldn’t get the rights. So Levine made it his mission to acquire at least one Stones classic. He suggested a few bangers instead of just one needledrop for the section of the musical where bad-boy paramour the Duke of Monroth seduces Satine. The result? A medley of “Sympathy for the Devil,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and “Gimme Shelter.” “They [liked] that we made something that has an arc and conflict within it,” Timbers says.
Of course, you can’t always get what you want, and there are some tunes that the team either couldn’t get the rights to or that didn’t make the cut, including Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Queen’s “The Show Must Go On,” and Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk.” During the tryout in Boston, the second act contained a backstage scene goosed by Florence and the Machine’s gothic-pop anthem “Shake It Out,” but when the show moved to Broadway, the rousing song fell by the wayside. “I heard more anger about that than any songs we cut from the movie,” Timbers says.
As the ultimate jukebox musical, “Moulin Rouge!” audiences sometimes sing along to the lyrics karaoke-style or cheer wildly when a favorite tune comes on. Working with familiar songs, Levine says, can cut both ways.
“Recognition activates the audience. The sweet spot is when you recognize the song and simultaneously recognize how it’s being used in the show so that it hooks you in rather than alienates you in a Brechtian sense. The delicate balance is that we’re relying on people’s knowledge of these songs as a way to put a little extra gas in the tank.”
MOULIN ROUGE! THE MUSICAL Presented by Broadway in Boston. At the Citizens Bank Opera House, Jan. 16-Feb. 4. Tickets from $50. www.broadwayinboston.com