Moulin Rouge! The Musical, the stage adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s movie musical about love, tuberculosis, and exclamation points has cast its very dreamy stars. Karen Olivo (West Side Story, In the Heights) and Aaron Tveit (Next to Normal, Grease: Live) will be the ones singing on top of that elephant as Satine and Christian, while Danny Burstein (Fiddler on the Roof) will play the Moulin Rouge’s host Harold Zidler. Sahr Ngaujah (Fela!) will play Toulouse-Lautrec, Ricky Rojas (Burn the Floor) will play the tango dancer Santiago, Robyn Hurder (Nice Work If You Can Get It) will play Nini, and Tam Mutu (Doctor Zhivago) will play the dastardly Duke of Monroth. Alex Timbers, who directed Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Peter and the Starcatcher, was hired and fired from the Frozen adaptation, and is also currently working on the Beetlejuice musical (busy guy!), will direct. It’ll also have a book from John Logan (Red); choreography from Sonya Tayeh (Kung Fu); and music supervision, orchestrations, and arrangements by Justin Levine (Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson).
Moulin Rouge! will eventually head to Broadway, but first, it’ll play its out-of-town run at Boston’s Emerson Colonial Theatre this summer, from June 27 to August 5. Time to figure out how well absinthe mixes with Dunkin’ Donuts cold brew.