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'Moulin Rouge! The Musical' comes to Popejoy
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“Moulin Rouge! The Musical” is a true Broadway spectacle, full of glitz and glitter.
“It’s very larger-than-life. Glitter everywhere,” Danny Burgos, who plays Santiago in the current touring production, said. “I take glitter home with me every night after the show.”
“Moulin Rouge!,” which is based on the 2001 Baz Luhrmann film of the same name, opens at Popejoy on Tuesday, Oct. 21. Fans of the film, Burgos said, will appreciate the adaptation.
“Baz and the entire creative team were able to take what we know and love from Baz Luhrmann’s films and translate it so beautifully to the stage without losing any of that grandness,” he said. “I always tell people, you’re gonna come into the theater expecting one thing and leave being like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that they could do it like that.’”
The musical numbers are medleys of hit songs from different eras, and they have been updated to include new music since the film came out.
“I think it’s remarkable that they were able to take that story and just add new pop songs to infuse it with the music of today,” Burgos said.
Not everyone in the audience will know every song, but most people, regardless of age or musical taste, will recognize songs that they like.
“My stepdad was the biggest success story,” Burgos said. “He is not a musical theater-goer at all. But the Duke has a great song called ‘Sympathy for the Duke,’ and it’s (based on) ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ (by the Rolling Stones). He’s a big classic rock buff, so when he heard that song, he was like, ‘No way!’”
The genre-spanning score weaves together artists as diverse as Cab Calloway, Bob Dylan, Madonna, Outkast, the White Stripes and Sia.
“There are 70-plus songs in our show, and some are sampled for as little as ten seconds,” Burgos said. “And they all lead to a progression in the story.”
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The story itself is quite simple.
“It is, at its core, a very simple love story that we know and love,” Burgos said. “Boy likes girl. Boy can’t have the girl. Boy goes for the girl anyway.”
Set in fin-de-siècle Paris, “Moulin Rouge!” centers on a group of artists and bohemians in the neighborhood of Montmartre, famous at the time for its active nightlife and high concentration of artist studios. Burgos’ character, Santiago, is an Argentinian tango dancer.
“You don’t get much of his backstory, but in my brain, Santiago has left Argentina and come to Paris, because at this point, in 1899, if you wanted to be an artist, there was no better place to do it than Paris,” Burgos said.
The director, Alex Timbers, and associate director, Matt DiCarlo, told Burgos that he and the other three leads “each embody one of the four bohemian qualities, which are truth, beauty, freedom and love.”
“My word is beauty, but that is not physical beauty,” Burgos said. “It’s the beauty of the time, the beauty that you can relay through art. So, I use my body (as a dancer) to communicate how much I love this time period, this art form and the people around me.”
And Burgos said he plays Santiago slightly “bigger” than he normally acts to suit the musical’s grand spectacle.
“I mean, my character, Santiago, is a swashbuckler, the greatest tango dancer in Paris, a gigolo,” he said. “And when you think about the way Baz Luhrmann builds the world, ‘larger than life’ actually does serve you here. To be loud and fast and almost a caricature actually suits this world. To be too small, if you’re giving me Noel Coward or Shakespeare acting, that’s just not the right thing. To be too small would actually make you stick out more than to lean in and just really invest in being larger than life.”
