“Moulin Rouge! The Musical,” about the doomed love affair of a writer and a courtesan at a decadent Paris nightclub, will end its Broadway run this summer.
The show’s producers announced on Thursday that the musical will play its final performance at the Al Hirschfeld Theater on July 26, which is almost exactly seven years after it opened on July 25, 2019. At the time of its closing it will have played 2,289 performances, including previews.
The run has been, by any measure, a success, despite having its early momentum interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. In 2021, at a pandemic-delayed Tony Awards ceremony, it won 10 prizes, including for best new musical. And in 2022 the show recouped its $28 million capitalization — the amount of money it cost to get the show to Broadway — meaning the musical, unlike most, has been profitable.
As of Feb. 1, the Broadway production had been seen by 2.6 million people, and had sold $348 million worth of tickets.
Broadway is now just one part of the “Moulin Rouge!” story. The musical has had 14 other productions; it is currently running in London’s West End as well as in Germany, the Netherlands and South Korea. Touring productions are traveling North America and internationally, and there are non-replica productions — using the Broadway book and songs but not the same direction or design — in Scandinavia and Italy. (A pre-Broadway production ran in 2018 at the Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston.)
“Moulin Rouge!” was among the Broadway shows hardest hit by the pandemic. Much of its cast was sick, some quite seriously, in early 2020, and the show was the first to close, hours before all others followed, on March 12 of that year. The musical resumed performances on Sept. 24, 2021.
The show’s grosses were generally stronger before the pandemic than after, but have mostly remained healthy. Over the last year, the grosses have softened somewhat.
“It’s been a glorious run on Broadway,” Carmen Pavlovic, one of the show’s lead producers, wrote in an email, “and we wanted to leave on a high.”
The musical is adapted from Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film, starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, and, like the stage musical, featuring a score of anachronistic pop songs — a contemporary sound that enlivens a love story set in 1899. The Broadway production is directed by Alex Timbers and features a book by John Logan; it has an enveloping and richly red set by Derek McLane that includes two famous icons of the Moulin Rouge nightclub: a windmill and an elephant.
The lead producers are Pavlovic and Gerry Ryan, representing the Australian company Global Creatures, as well as Bill Damaschke, an American producer. It is the first Broadway success for Global Creatures, a company that originally specialized in arena animatronics shows.
The company has an interest in projects with connections to Australia — Luhrmann is Australian — and has been developing stage adaptations of “Muriel’s Wedding,” a film starring Toni Collette as an Abba-loving misfit, and “Boy Swallows Universe,” Trent Dalton’s coming-of-age novel.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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