A jukebox musical based on Baz Luhrmann's 2001 film, Moulin Rouge! The Musical won 10 Tony Awards in 2021, the most of any show that year, including Best Musical. Its Broadway run was announced to close on 30 August 2026, after 2,297 regular performances.
Jukebox and film-based musicals can carry different rush or lottery terms than straight plays — check the specific show's official ticketing page rather than assuming a blanket Broadway policy.
Baz Luhrmann's 2001 film was already a collage — its lovers argued in fragments of Elton John, David Bowie and the Beatles. John Logan's stage book takes that method and extends it forward, adding songs written in the two decades after the film so that the score becomes a survey of pop hooks rather than a soundtrack transfer. Dozens of songs pass through, most of them in pieces. The famous medley in which two characters court each other entirely in other people's lyrics is the show's thesis rather than a novelty number.
Derek McLane's design does not stop at the proscenium. An elephant occupies one side of the Al Hirschfeld Theatre and a windmill the other, the house is dressed in red, and the audience is inside the club before the lights go down. Alex Timbers directed and Sonya Tayeh choreographed; Catherine Zuber's costumes, Justin Townsend's lighting and Peter Hylenski's sound complete a design package that was rewarded as a unit.
The production tried out at Boston's Emerson Colonial Theatre in the summer of 2018 and opened on Broadway in July 2019. Its Tony ceremony, delayed by the pandemic closure, took place in 2021, where it won ten awards including Best Musical, Best Direction, Best Choreography, Best Orchestrations and every design category for a musical. Aaron Tveit won Best Actor in a Musical as the sole nominee in his category, a distinction that still required him to clear the voters' approval threshold.
The standard objection to jukebox musicals is that the plot bends to accommodate the catalogue. That criticism lands oddly here, because the underlying story — a courtesan, a poor writer, a wealthy patron, a fatal illness — is deliberately the oldest one available: the nineteenth-century courtesan melodrama that opera had already worked through in La Traviata. The songs are not filling a gap in the narrative; the narrative is a frame built to hold them.
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Moulin Rouge! The Musical is a jukebox musical with a book by John Logan. The musical is based on the 2001 film Moulin Rouge! directed by Baz Luhrmann and written by Luhrmann and Craig Pearce. Moulin Rouge! is set in Paris during the Belle Epoque; it follows Christian, a young composer, who falls in love with Satine, a courtesan and the star of the Moulin Rouge cabaret.
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