The Moulin Rouge Has Arrived in New York City

Well over a hundred years after the Moulin Rouge first opened in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris in 1889, the legendary cabaret club is still known as a place of allure and fantasy. It is fitting, then, that liberties are often taken when telling the story of the iconic venue in modern times. In the new Broadway version of Moulin Rouge!,, which opens on July 25 at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, the greatest liberty is perhaps the musical numbers.

In the play, Christian (Aaron Tveit), Satine (Karen Olivo), and company belt out a plethora of hit songs which no bohemian living in 1890s Paris had ever heard—and they even sing plenty of tunes which did not yet exist at the time of the Oscar-winning 2001 Baz Luhrmann film upon which the play is based. Numbers by Lady Gaga, Pink, Katy Perry, and many more all make appearances in this version, as do movie favorites like “Lady Marmalade” and “Your Song.”

The rooms in which the cancan girls and artistes dance their hearts out, however, are a different story. Tony-winning scenic designer Derek McLane “spent a long time looking at images of Paris in the 1890s,” he tells Architectural Digest—specifically the work of Eugène Atget and pictures of artists' studios. He was particularly struck by the clear Moroccan, Indian, and Chinese influences brought to the city by colonialism, and tried to bring a certain historic authenticity to the stage production.

That’s not to say that this set is anything short of an over-the-top, opulent spectacle, or that there aren’t dreamlike moments (absinthe is imbibed in this play, obviously). It’s just that when the came time to create the inside of the Moulin Rouge, the real thing—with its rich past—provided inspiration in spades. “Not only is the Moulin Rouge this really crazy, extravagant club—probably as extravagant as our version of it—but there were other clubs in the neighborhood that were really pretty outrageous and interesting architecturally,” says McLane.

He also incorporated some nods to the beloved film. “There are certain things in the movie that I wanted to pay tribute to and make an homage to,” he says. “One is, in the movie there are some heart-shaped portals in the club, and I definitely did my own version of those. I think that they recall that image in the movie. If you were to compare a photograph [of the film with one of the stage], you’d see a lot of differences, but I don’t think most people are going to do that.”

Intricate panels with cutout hearts surround the stage at various points, moving to make room for the dancers, at the request of choreographer Sonya Tayeh. “I said, ‘I am proposing that we have this much more intimate, constricted space for the club, because of what it will feel like.’ That doesn’t give [Tayeh] as much space, but she really kind of embraced that,” McLane says. “The concession that I made—which actually was a bonus to the design—is that there’s this kind of lacy brass work on the inside panels, and it retracts. When it goes away, it makes the space about four feet wider wider. It sort of started from a place of wanting to give Sonya more space for dancing, but actually I think it looks really cool.”

For the audience, the club scenes really do feel like a night at the Moulin Rouge, especially since McLane even dressed offstage areas of the Hirschfeld to look the part. “It is not insanely ornate,” says McLane of the venue, so he added an additional proscenium, built intricate railings with figures of cherubs and windmills out of cast plaster covered in gold leaf, added red velvet to the walls, hung additional chandeliers, and more accoutrements.

And the remaining scenes, he hopes, feel like the streets of Paris. "One thing I loved in the movie was that sense of the neighborhood that you got with these camera shots that they had that went over these Montmartre buildings, which they built in miniature." An aerial pan might not have been feasible during a live production, but McLane positioned model buildings so they are visible from various sets, like Satine's bedroom and the garret of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (played by Sahr Ngaujah). "The same buildings in sort of different configurations keep reappearing. That was a very deliberate thing, to try to really give the sense that these things are all close to one another."

All together, the sets create the wonderful world of Montmartre, where the characters strive to achieve the four bohemian ideals: truth, beauty, freedom, and love.