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[0:00] Gordon Cox: Welcome to Stagecraft, Variety's theatre podcast, bringing you backstage and behind the scenes with the stars and creators of the hottest shows on Broadway, off Broadway and beyond. I'm your host, Gordon Cox. On this episode of Stagecraft, I'm talking to the writer John Logan and the director Alex Timbers, two of the creators of the new Broadway adaptation of Baz Luhrmann's 2001 movie musical hit, Moulin Rouge!. Logan is the Tony-winning writer of the play Red, as well as the play I'll Eat You Last, and the stinging musical The Last Ship, and also a busy screenwriter of films including Skyfall, Gladiator, The Aviator, and Hugo. Timbers, meanwhile, has directed everything from the off-Broadway hit Here Lies Love, to Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Oh Hello on Broadway, The Pee Wee Herman Show, and Rocky, and his latest Broadway production, Beetlejuice, just opened in April. Both Logan and Timbers are here in the studio with me to talk elephants, windmills, hit songs, and working with Baz. Hello.

[1:03] John Logan: Hello.

[1:04] Alex Timbers: Hi, Alex and John. Thanks for being here.

[1:06] John Logan: Pleasure. Thank you.

[1:07] Gordon Cox: So, I'm talking to you maybe not quite two weeks after you started previews at the Al Hirschfeld. How's the show going here in New York?

[1:16] Alex Timbers: Oh, the show's great. We're having a terrific time. The audiences have been wonderful, and it's just exciting. We've been working on it for about a year since our Boston run.

[1:27] Gordon Cox: Right. That was last summer, yeah?

[1:29] Alex Timbers: That's right. That's right. And so, there have been all these sort of ideas that have popped up, and so it's just great to get real-time feedback on them.

[1:36] John Logan: Yeah. It's also nice to get to show it to our friends. We were talking about the show for so long, and people didn't get to make it to Boston to say, well, what is this thing you'll be working on? So, we'll come see it.

[1:46] Alex Timbers: That's right.

[1:47] John Logan: That's thrilling to have your friends and family come in and just enjoy it.

[1:49] Gordon Cox: And how different is – you mentioned it's been a year, and you've done some work on it since then – how different is what we are seeing on Broadway from what audiences saw in Boston?

[1:59] Alex Timbers: I would say we've been refining. We've been refining, shaping, having the time away from Boston to say, you know, we can do certain things better. We cut a song. We cut down the show.

[2:10] Gordon Cox: What was the song?

[2:11] John Logan: We cut Shake It Out from the show for dramatic reasons. It had nothing to do with the song.

[2:15] Alex Timbers: Of course.

[2:16] John Logan: It was just narrative momentum, and as things were changing with the emotional truth of the characters, then music had to change as well. But I'd say we cut 10 minutes out of the show since Boston.

[2:24] Alex Timbers: That's right. Yeah.

[2:25] Gordon Cox: What was the biggest takeaway that you learned from those out-of-town audiences?

[2:31] John Logan: I would say for me, as the book writer, it was we were sort of fumbling the ball a bit in the second act emotionally. I don't think we were quite charting through Christian and Satine's emotions clearly enough, and I felt their motivations maybe were a little fuzzy at certain points that we maybe sort of papered over with really great music and spectacle and staging, but it wasn't rock solid. So, I think the majority of work I've done with Alex on the book is tightening, shaping, and giving a real emotional trajectory to those two characters.

[3:01] Alex Timbers: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. We've been a lot focused on the second act. There have been some stuff throughout that we wanted to plus, but it's a lot about sort of a narrative economy. How do we make it funnier? How do we make the show more emotional? How do we make the characters more emotionally rich? I think John's done amazing work on just going through all the character relationships and deepening them. I see it. I see people who saw it in Boston, see it here, and it feels like it's dropped to a deeper place emotionally, and that's really rewarding.

[3:36] John Logan: Yeah, and the balance with that is we've also sort of doubled down on the spectacle of the show. We've been able to do things.

[3:41] Alex Timbers: Really?

[3:42] John Logan: If you can believe it. You know, in Boston, it was a little black box production.

[3:46] Alex Timbers: Yeah, yeah.

[3:47] John Logan: No, but we felt there were certain things we weren't quite delivering in terms of the enchantment you feel when you watch the movie. So, we sort of explored that more.

[3:56] Gordon Cox: Right. Let's talk a little bit about how you both got involved. I know the process has been three or four years for both of you, it sounds like. Who got on board first?

[4:07] Alex Timbers: Back in summer 2013, I was at a dinner party, and I was seated next to Baz for the dinner course, and then the dessert, we got to talking about movies.

[4:18] Gordon Cox: Was Baz Luhrmann's work as a director, before you knew him, was that at all influential on you?

[4:25] Alex Timbers: Oh yeah, hugely influential. I had a theater company that did work that was sort of like taking historical figures and subject matter and put them in sort of a reverent and sort of contemporary sort of idiom suited to them. And so, someone like Baz, of course, is a huge influence. And so, I was curious about his influences. So, I asked him about, we were talking about Ken Russell, who's someone that Logan and I both love. And I was like, do you love Joe? And so, we started just going, and he had seen Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and Here Lies Love. And the next day, I got an email from him that said, hey, you know, I'm thinking about adapting Moulin Rouge for the stage, but I don't want to do it myself. I want sort of like a next generation me. And would you ever consider? And I was wildly flattered. And then the next question is, who's going to write it? And that's where John Logan, a hero of mine, came into view.

[5:19] Gordon Cox: Okay. And so, what makes John good for this job?

[5:23] Alex Timbers: Well, John's just an incredible writer because he straddles all sorts of genre. He straddles all sorts of mediums. He writes plays, musicals, movies, TV. So, he's incredibly nimble, incredibly fast. He's great at elevating genre. He's great at writing great emotion and comedy right next to each other. And he has this sense of economy and a kind of sophistication that sometimes those don't always coexist in authors. And so, immediately, when you look at his body of work, and then you think about the Venn diagram of all that, Moulin Rouge might sit squarely in the middle of it, yeah.

[6:02] Gordon Cox: Right. And John, what did you think when the idea was talked to you?

[6:05] John Logan: The first I heard was an email from my agent saying, would you be remotely interested in writing the book for the stage musical Moulin Rouge? And I emailed back, yes, and it's the best idea I've ever heard.

[6:14] Gordon Cox: Why?

[6:16] John Logan: Because I know the movie intimately.

[6:19] Gordon Cox: Because you saw it a lot because you love it?

[6:21] John Logan: Because I love it. Because I saw it and I thought it was... I'd never seen anything like it. And when you see something original, truly original in cinema, you have to pay attention. I felt the same way when I saw Taxi Driver for the first time. I said, I've never seen that thing done like that before. And Moulin Rouge had that incredible combination of cinematic budget domain and incredible truth behind it that I found ravishing. And so, I knew instantly it could work on the stage. And then when I talked to Alex, I was incredibly excited because I had seen Here Lies Love and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and one of the gifts, one of the many gifts that Alex has is creating an environment that you go into these shows and you're enveloped in a complete world. You don't walk in, look at the proceeding, the curtain goes up and there's a little Blimpson play. You're part of an entire world.

[7:08] John Logan: So from our first discussion over the phone, we talked about wanting to be immersed in the Moulin Rouge. The audience member would walk in and the Moulin Rouge would be the envelope for all the melodrama, all the comedy, all the emotion. And once we were speaking the same language and had a shared vocabulary about that, it was effortless. It was off to the races.

[7:29] Alex Timbers: Yeah. I called our producers after our conversation, Carmen and Bill, who have been wonderful and just immediately was like, oh my God, we have a kindred spirit here. We're just speaking the same language. And John and I hadn't talked before that, but all our assumptions about what the strengths of the material are, what might be possible in the theatrical adaptation, immediately we're speaking the same language. And it's been that way since. It's been really exciting.

[7:52] Gordon Cox: Tell us a little bit more about that. What are the strengths of the material in your eyes and what do you feel is essential in the story and in the property that you wanted to preserve or find an equivalent to on stage?

[8:05] John Logan: The essential thing about Moulin Rouge for me is it is a passionate presentation about love. And the genius of Baz Luhrmann is to take a period story, a La Boheme story, a Traviata story, and put popular music into it. And so it had this frisson between a classical structure and cheeky irreverence at rock and roll. And so I was always excited by that and we were always excited about it.

[8:32] Alex Timbers: And from the first call, the idea was we would update the score and bring in the world of modern popular music to the piece.

[8:39] Gordon Cox: And why was that important?

[8:42] Alex Timbers: When audiences saw the film in 2001, everything was calibrated to have a certain immediate response for them, whether it was a Queen song that might feel like a throwback or something that felt much more contemporary. And early on, it just felt really important to us that audiences in 2019 have the exact same relationship. So we've updated the score with a lot of more artists that have made music in the intervening 18 years, but also even gone further back to Cab Calloway. So it's been really exciting. We've been able to, I think, double down on what Baz and the music supervisor did for the film. And we have something like over 80 songs in it. One of the other things that was a really exciting, interesting challenge, and we talked about from the beginning, is what is the theatrical vocabulary for something that is so cinematically virtuosic?

What do we do? We don't have whip pans. We don't have music video style editing. We don't have sped up steady cams racing through the streets of Montmartre. And so that's been a lot of the journey over the last couple of years as well, is saying, how do you visually, narratively, emotionally have that same energetic feel and make something that is holy for the stage?

[10:01] John Logan: Right. Because the demands of the stage are very different than the demands of cinema. And what we have on the stage is things happening in real time. There's a temporal reality. And the classical musical structure is you meet a character, you learn about that character, the character expresses themselves in song. So when we were building the story, building the book, creating the characters, teasing it out, we looked at it as an original musical, like we were doing South Pacific. As a new plot was emerging, as character backstories were deepening between the characters, we thought, all right, here's an opportunity for a song that isn't in the movie, but our show demands this song. And that was thrilling. How would you say, for people who haven't maybe seen the musical yet, or maybe they know the movie, how much of that story is new? Did you end up...

[10:51] John Logan: What we see on stage is a jumping off point from the film and how much is it sort of reflected in the film itself? I would say the DNA of the piece is very similar. It's a heightened, operatic, cheeky, fun, sexy presentation of the story of Christian, Satine, and the demi-monde of the Moulin Rouge! I think the particulars of the narrative are very different. I think we go in different directions because the stage both demands that we do that and allows us to do that. In the intervening time since the movie came out, I think we've got to look at some things differently and we're in a different moment. Of course, the setup in the movie is that Satine, the courtesan, does not sleep with the Duke.

Alex and I thought, is it perhaps a more interesting idea if she does sleep with him so the romantic triangle between Christian, the Duke, and Satine has more theatrical vitality sort of in real time. Once we made that rather straightforward decision early on, it impacted the rest of the plot working through. I think you have certain demands of the protagonists in a musical. They really need to be taking agency at every possible opportunity. They can be like Charlie Brown. They can be getting up to the football. The football can get yanked away. At every possible moment, we need to keep making sure that Christian and Satine are making positive, active choices. That's just not necessarily the demand that is put on these characters in the film.

The whole framing device is different in the film. It's been exciting. I have to say, to Baz's credit, here's a beloved masterpiece. I mean, one of his many masterpieces, but every step of the way, he's been like, go, do it. I love it. At certain moments, he's also been an incredible true north being like, I love what you're doing with the Duke, but just remember that he serves XYZ function emotionally at this moment. You're like, okay, got it. Okay. Here's a way to bridge both our ideas.

[12:45] Gordon Cox: That was actually one of my questions. What are some of the good advice that you've gotten from Baz or the notes that you've gotten from him as he's been going along?

[12:54] John Logan: One of the probably best pieces I've gotten from Baz, and I would say without hesitation, he's the best dramaturge I've ever worked with in terms of looking at a piece diagnostically. In an early workshop, we had sort of a darker version of Christian as a character. We went down sort of a Logan and Timbers road with the character. Christian, we should say, is the Ewan McGregor character for people who don't know. Yeah. Baz was able to talk to us about the character and what that decision meant in terms of the stakes, in terms of the love story with Satine. It was very useful. In no way was it make it more like the movie. It was make it true to the story you're telling, so you'll have the most emotional response. Because he always comes back to one thing, which is the audience has to feel at the end of the show.

[13:37] Gordon Cox: Right. Alex, you just worked on another screen to stage adaptation with Beetlejuice. Was there anything that you learned on Beetlejuice that you could apply to Moulin Rouge? And or how are these two projects very different in terms of what your work is?

[13:54] Alex Timbers: I think that with both projects, we had really the luxury to sort of say, okay, here's the world. Here are the characters. Here's the basic story. And then we're given the sort of grace to sort of make our own choices about what theatrically might be most exciting. I think one of the things that's been really fun about both of them, and I think Moulin Rouge is stacked full of them, is the sort of Easter eggs of moments and images and ideas and song quotes from the film that you're sort of, you might not even know you're hungering for, but delivered in ways that are surprising, unusual, and inherently theatrical. And that's really the most fun because the movie is so witty. And to be able to deliver that moment that you love from the film, but in a way that sort of catches you by surprise because it's done in the inverse way, that's really gratifying.

And it's one of the things that makes it so fun to sit in the audience and watch it, because I've rarely been involved with something that has such complicity with its audience. It's a binary relation between the audience and the piece, because when a song quote comes in, they recognize it. They're excited they recognize it. They might be charmed at how we use it or shocked at how we use it, but there's a real dialogue. And it's fulfilling to think we've done our work scrupulously in such a way that we've planted those ideas that the audience is viscerally responding all the time to the piece.

[15:22] Gordon Cox: Yeah. And John, you wrote the screenplay adaptation of Sweeney Todd, which is kind of the reverse process, right? Taking a stage musical and putting it on screen. Did you learn anything from that that at all applied to the language?

[15:36] John Logan: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I spent five years with Steve Sondheim working on that screenplay, so I got to understand the mechanics, the engineering, going into the guts of building a musical. And one of the things that Steve was so insistent on is that if a book scene exists without music, it has to justify itself, and it has to be a link in a way between things. And I found that incredibly useful.

[16:00] Gordon Cox: Let's talk a little bit about, we started to talk a little bit about the music and the new stuff that you've interpolated in. It's not an insignificant amount of new music.

[16:11] John Logan: It is a ton of newer stuff that is newer than 2001. It's like Beyoncé and Katy Perry and Rihanna and lots of other people. What was that process? Whose ideas, what song? And where do the ideas originate? And then what is the process of sort of deciding whether they're right for a moment or for the show in general?

[16:35] Alex Timbers: It's really, for me, I think probably the most enjoyable part of the three years.

[16:39] John Logan: I agree, yeah.

[16:40] Alex Timbers: Yeah, the music supervisor is a man named Justin Levine, who's a genius. And his encyclopedic knowledge of music from Tin Pan Alley and before all the way to Tomorrow is astounding. And the way we worked is it was very interdigit. That is, Alex and I were building the story and discussing it. I came up with an outline and then Justin came into the process. And the sort of weekend I think Moulin Rouge came to life for me is the three of us were locked away in a hotel room in Times Square. And I had note cards and I said, here's what I think the story is. And we spotted in the songs. And Alex suggested songs, I suggested songs, and Justin Levine suggested a thousand songs. And he played them and he had a keyboard and we got to explore different opportunities. And all the way along, the three of us have built the piece together.

[17:32] Gordon Cox: What songs did either of you suggest for the piece that are still in there?

[17:39] John Logan: I suggested our favorite song that we could not get the rights to, as a matter of fact. And I did suggest "Shut Up and Dance." That was mine.

[17:45] Alex Timbers: Okay, yeah.

[17:46] John Logan: I was hesitant to suggest it because these guys are ferocious and they know their music. But it made it in.

[17:53] Alex Timbers: Yeah, look, all along the way with the Elephant Love Medley, all these different sections are, it's so collaborative that at a happy point, you kind of forget where things originated. And I'd also mention that Sonia Tai, our choreographer, who's a total visionary and brilliant, also was completely helpful in the iterative process of figuring out the music and just the whole musical, emotional life. And so that's one of the happiest parts, is that there's these moments where you're like, and that moment was me, that moment was you, and then it all frothed up into a bigger thing.

[18:35] John Logan: And within a single song, for people who haven't seen the show yet, there are songs that are, I feel like, it feels like, what did you say, John, before we turned the microphone? There's one that's like 25 layered songs at once.

[18:45] Alex Timbers: Yeah, the end of the first act, we call our Elephant Love Medley, it's got 25 different songs. And it's just a series of quotes that all somehow managed to sound like one piece of music.

[18:55] John Logan: And form a dialogue between the two characters.

[18:56] Alex Timbers: Right, exactly. Because we were always led by narrative, by character. There was never any point of thinking, oh, this is a cool song I really like, let's put it in the show. It was all with, the songs justified themselves dramatically, either to express a character or move us forward in the plot.

[19:10] John Logan: When we saw the workshop, without going through the songs that we didn't end up using, just like any other musical, we had songs in certain spots, and we're like, is this operating in the most character-specific, narratively efficient ways? Pop songs, in general, are tricky beasts for the musical theater, because you've got a hook that happens usually about three times in a song, and it doesn't usually emotionally transform. And so, usually in the bridge, you find the emotional pivot for any song, but a song, it can get repetitive. It's verse-chorus, verse-chorus, bridge-chorus, at its most basic. And so, it's a real, there's a lot of narrative and dramatic challenges inherent in doing this.

[19:53] Alex Timbers: And none of the songs are bespoke.

[19:54] John Logan: Right.

[19:55] Gordon Cox: So, that was one of my questions for you, John, actually, is that, in my head, that feels, probably it makes your job quite a bit harder, because there is not a songwriter with you working to contextualize.

[20:06] John Logan: It just makes it different, not harder or easier, because once we'd explored these songs so deeply, I felt we'd written them. We were so invested in every word, and sometimes, we were led by lyric. For example, Satine's first song, where she stands alone on stage, the first time anyone is alone on stage singing a song, is Satine, and she sings "Firework."

[20:28] Gordon Cox: We should say, this is "Firework" by Katy Perry.

[20:37] John Logan: Yes, by the by. But it's a good example of how a popular song can be reused in a way that the audience hears it in a different way, so it feels like a bespoke song to that character at that moment.

[20:49] Gordon Cox: Right. John, you alluded to one of my questions. Well, I sort of assume that, at this point, you can say Baz Luhrmann and Moulin Rouge, and that sort of opens all doors, and people like Rihanna say, sure, go ahead and use my music. But I guess you couldn't get the rights to some things? How hard was that process, and how much of a back and forth was it?

[21:06] John Logan: It was an intensely complicated process, because there's something like 160 composers involved in all the songs, and many of the songs have multiple publishers, and you had to get approvals from everyone, including the artist. Some people didn't want their songs used because, for example, they're working on a print show, for example. So that's not spoken for. Some artists just don't like their work repurposed for any other purpose than what they imagine. So it's all completely understandable why they wouldn't want to be part of the show. They will regret it, however. Yeah, and there were certain things that got so frustratingly close. There was one song we had where we had seven out of eight of the approvals.

[21:57] John Logan: One of the things, no, I think we're really happy with the score as it ended up, I mean that's speaking just for me. Yeah, absolutely, because at some point when we were denied songs it forced us to go back to the drawing board and go into the DNA of the scenes and the characters and find different ways to express things. So, it was always part of the creative process to keep teasing out the relation between the story, the characters and the music. So, it was helpful in the end. And what was the thinking in terms of what songs from the movie you were sort of must-haves? I think it was what was most narratively helpful to us, right? I mean, there were songs that you might think of as one of the big hits from the movie that we just felt wasn't sort of narratively useful to us. And so, we never felt, and Baz never at any point made us feel, felt tied down to any element in the original score.

[22:48] Alex Timbers: How, do you find that the music operates differently in this music being pre-existing music that people have pre-existing associations with as opposed to working on a musical with new music? The only thing I will say from that, I would say no, other than this important, important thing to the conceit, is that there are so many musicals, we can name half a dozen right now, where the conceit is that someone is writing the greatest song ever or working on the greatest poem or the greatest play ever. And then eventually in the second act, they sing that song or they read that poem and you're like, that's pretty good. But what we have and what Baz's crazy conceit is, is that you have not only the greatest pop catalog at Christian the poet's fingertips, but you have all the deep emotional resonance.

This is the song I fell in love with. This is the song I broke up. This is the song that... And so, everyone's relationship to the score is actually highly personal and that's a cool special sauce that I think makes the show really unique.

[24:02] Alex Timbers: John started to talk a little bit about this, but Alex, it's quite opulent and quite red as John was pointing out, the production and there's an elephant and there's a windmill and it does, it's not, you don't just see it on the proscenium, it's sort of up in the boxes and everything. Tell us about your thinking in terms of what the world is and how you sort of thought about taking the kind of Technicolor kind of saturation of a Baz Luhrmann movie and putting it on stage. One of the things that I think I can speak for John and myself with this is that we're always thinking about the audience at every moment. As John said, it's not like a curtain goes up and then a life happens on stage and then a curtain goes down.

And so, you're thinking about what is the audience's relationship to the drama. I think one of the things that's really fun about this show, I would say it's true of Here Lies Love too, is the audience is cast. The audience is cast as attendees at the club. At certain moments, they have a voyeuristic relationship to the drama, but at the beginning and the end, they are in that club and we are all in a room together. And I think that's sort of the frisson and like when Ziedler looks you in the eye or the can-can girl catches you out of the corner. That's so exciting. And so, for us, the idea of starting in England and dialing back time as we sort of are dialing forward and making that journey with Christian wasn't really where Baz's mind went first or John's mind or my mind.

And that was the idea of like, you go to see Moulin Rouge, you want to go to that club. You want to enter those doors at 45th Street and walk into the space. And it felt important to us also to just to make a couple of contrasting worlds, the world of the poverty, the grid of Montmartre, and then what I described as like the deluxe maximalism of the club.

[26:02] Alex Timbers: And when you think of people who have the versatility to create that kind of that beauty and the grandeur, but also have the like clever storytelling skills of say, how do you in a finite box create like a billion locations? You think of Derek McLean, a guy who does the Oscars, but also does new group shows where you've got 15 panels in like 45 locations to represent them in a 200 seat theater. And so, he's where we began. And then we went to Kathy Zuber and they share a studio. And luckily, the two of them, we charted through all the color together. We also had certain principles that were true to CM, Baz's partner in crime and Baz himself that were things that sort of steered them and that we used as well, which is that the scenery and the costumes would all be period elements just juxtaposed in ways that might be surprising or feel contemporary.

But everything was ground in that. You couldn't have like a leather baseball cap, for example. And yet the lighting and the sound and the choreography could be very contemporary. And I think it's really important for mashups because people think, there have to be like really rigorous rules. And that was true of Baz and CM and that was true of Derek and Kathy and myself.

[27:11] Alex Timbers: Right. Yeah. Let's also talk a little bit about the casting. The cast is led by two sort of Broadway fan favorites, Aaron Tveit and Karen Olivo. As you were going through the casting process, what were you looking for to sort of capture that Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor had in the film? And then what are you finding that Aaron and Karen bring to their own interpretation? It's interesting the way you phrased that question. The last thing I was looking for was Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, quite frankly, because again, to recreate the sensibility of two other actors was inappropriate to what we were doing because we had to internalize these characters and create them the way we saw them.

And our Satine is grittier and gutsier. She has an agency to help her family in the Moulin Rouge in a way that Nicole Kidman's character in the movie did not because that's the way our plot evolved. So we were looking for a very different actor. And I think it's fair to say, we really wanted an actor of color for that role. And in Christian, the Ewan McGregor role, he really captured that sort of dewy naivete and emotional extremity. But our Christian also had to chart a long emotional journey for two hours on stage and so that had different requirements as well. So speaking for me, I sort of banished Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman from my thinking altogether.

[28:36] John Logan: That is true that in the adaptation process, you just at a certain point, you don't reference the movie anymore and you're in John Logan's script and you're servicing those characters that are coming alive off the page in that way. So the casting process, I think, for a theatrical adaptation is probably pretty different than what most people might think. And so what was it then you ended up, you found you were looking for about your Satine and your Christian? Well, I think the first, if you said to me, what paints a team with one color, it would be strength and courage, strength and courage. And so we were looking for an actor who had incredible grit and fortitude and strength. And Karen Olivo, far and away, represented it.

We frankly read a lot of actors, but there's no question from her first reading that she was this team that I was so excited about because she brings such dignity and such strength to everything she does. And Aaron, I've loved Aaron's work for years and was delighted when he came in and read and it's a voice from God, there's no question. But what really surprised me about Aaron's work is the emotional depth he goes to, because I don't think he's had a role that really allowed him to do that before. And the way he dives into the deep end of passion in our second act, I found very thrilling and moving.

[30:07] John Logan: So you both have a couple more weeks before the show opens. And then what's next for you after that? What's on your plate?

[30:13] John Logan: I'm going back to LA to start a new season of Penny Dreadful, which is the show that I run.

[30:22] Alex Timbers: And is this a sequel? Is this a companion series? Talk a little bit about it. It's very different. It's set in 1938 Los Angeles and it's about the history of sort of modern Los Angeles. But because the history of Los Angeles is Latino history, it also dials into folk Catholicism, Santa Muerte and Day of the Dead. So it's a combination of really history, city planning, racism and supernatural elements. And after that, I'm doing another musical at Berkeley Rep called Swept Away with the Avid Brothers.

[30:52] Alex Timbers: Perfect. Yeah. And Alex?

[30:55] Alex Timbers: Yeah. Two of my collaborators on Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Annie B. Parson, who are both two of the most extraordinary artists I've ever met. They've made this incredible theatrical event called American Utopia.

[31:06] John Logan: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about this. This is intriguing.

[31:08] Alex Timbers: It's unbelievable. It's David's next stop making sense. It's a retrospective of his career. It's a kind of like a pulse read on America through this visionary artist's eyes. And the mise en scene of it is so striking and breathtaking. And they've just done incredible works on. I'm lucky enough to get to help them bring it to Broadway. And it's coming to the Hudson Theater in the fall. And it's one of the... I'm so excited for New York to get to see this.

[31:40] John Logan: Well, we look forward to all those things. Thanks guys. Thanks for joining me and happy opening in a couple of weeks.

[31:47] John Logan: Thanks a lot.

[31:47] Alex Timbers: Thank you.

[31:51] John Logan: That was John Logan and Alex Timbers, the writer and director of Moulin Rouge, now playing at Broadway's Al Hirschfeld Theater. If you like what you're hearing on this and other episodes of StageCraft, we'd very much appreciate it if you took the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or tell a friend. I'll be back in two weeks with the writer, actor, comedian Rita Redner, the star and co-writer of the new off-Broadway musical, Two's a Crowd. Thanks for listening. And until then, see you at the theater.