INTERVIEW: Sahr Ngaujah finds truth, beauty, freedom, love in Broadway’s ‘Moulin Rouge!’
Photo: Moulin Rouge! stars, from left, Sahr Ngaujah, Aaron Tveit and Ricky Rojas. Photo courtesy of Matthew Murphy / Provided by BBB with permission.
Moulin Rouge!, the new hit musical at Broadway’s Al Hirschfeld Theatre, is an explosion of pop culture set amidst turn-of-the-century Paris. Love is in the air, and so are dozens of Top 40 hits by a bevy of well-known contemporary musicians.
One of the key characters in the musical, which is based off a beloved Baz Luhrmann movie starring Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, is Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who was a French painter and printmaker. He is often associated with the actual Moulin Rouge nightclub because of a series of stylistic posters he made of the establishment, which is located in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris.
If anyone has seen characteristic prints of high-stepping showgirls and spirited can-can dancing, there’s a good chance they are looking at Toulouse-Lautrec’s art.
Sahr Ngaujah, an alumnus of Broadway’s Fela! and off-Broadway’s recent Boesman and Lena, stars as Toulouse-Lautrec in the musical. He is joined on stage by Karen Olivo, Aaron Tveit, Tam Mutu, Ricky Rojas and Danny Burstein.
“I was contacted by my agent,” Ngaujah said about his addition to the show. “He said, ‘Look, there’s something coming up, and there was a request made for you to throw your hat in the ring, so to speak, for this role.’ ‘Which one is it?’ ‘Toulouse-Lautrec of Moulin Rouge!‘ I said, ‘Well, that sounds exciting, interesting, and let’s give it a go.’ I did a few rounds with it, and it worked out. This was at least two years ago, maybe two-and-a-half years ago at this point, so it was early stages.”
The development process for Moulin Rouge! was an interesting one for Ngaujah and the company because it took some time for the creative team to attain rights to the dozens of popular songs that are featured in the musical. This meant some songs were rehearsed but didn’t make it to the final version of the show, and others were inserted later once the rights were secured.
“Sitting around the table and preparing to create the production was kind of standard,” he said. “By the time we started doing workshops where we were on our feet, I realized how big the plans were. Once we did the biggest formal reading of it, which involved a lot of production values, it became pretty clear to me that we’re this early in the process and we have this many production values being tested, then the bigger picture must be huge. And the bigger picture is huge in comparison.”
Before taking on the role, Ngaujah was familiar with the real-life story of Toulouse-Lautrec, but approaching him as a character on a Broadway stage is a completely different venture. He needed to conduct more research, and that research is an ongoing process that continues to this day.
“I’ve been reading one of his biographies for a year and a half,” Ngaujah said. “I read it a bit more slowly these days, just kind of take it in, more like one would take in a series that they’re not binge-watching to [surround] myself with more of Toulouse-Lautrec’s life and what can be gleaned about his psyche in reading about his life. But beyond trying to get into his world through literature, one of the things that I try to do also, and I still work on to some degree, is to try to capture the essence of that period of time. I try to capture a way of showing a physical representation of Toulouse-Lautrec that kind of centers the viewer.”
Ngaujah is talking about performance style and how he has developed a full-body, full-emotion, full-voice representation of this infamous painter. In particular, the actor worked with director Alex Timbers and a movement coach to learn about the miming practices of French artist Jacques Lecoq.
“Why Lecoq?” Ngaujah asked. “Because Lecoq, he was one of the early pioneers of French mime, and I’m not just speaking about mime as in a striped shirt with white gloves pretending to be closed in a box, but a way of communicating ideas and movement that was very specific to Lecoq and his mentors. And so I did a bit of study of him, and I also spent a lot of time watching and rewatching a lot of Charlie Chaplin films because again his films were being made 20 years after Toulouse-Lautrec died. The point there again is to try to give movement reference that puts people’s mind into the time period as well as to try to find a creative way to indicate who Toulouse-Lautrec is as a body moving through space.”
The songbook for Moulin Rouge! is a truly dizzying collection of pop songs, featuring everyone from Adele to Madonna. Ngaujah admitted that during the development phase, he did not know approximately 80 percent of the songs. Now he hears them all the time on the radio.
“Most of my colleagues did, but I didn’t,” he said with a laugh. “There were a few, some of which aren’t in the show anymore, but there were a few that I was familiar with. But a lot of them I didn’t know. After I began to learn the music, I started to hear the songs everywhere and understood the ubiquitousness of the songs in popular culture. I mean, I didn’t doubt that they were ubiquitous, but I just didn’t know. … Today, we sing the songs, and I listen and watch thousands of audience members sing along.”
He gives credit for this infectious music to Justin Levine, who is billed as music supervisor, co-orchestrator, arranger and writer of additional lyrics. On the creative team, he is joined by John Logan as book writer, Derek McLane as scenic designer, Catherine Zuber as costume designer and Sonya Tayeh as choreographer. Timbers is at the helm as director.
Ngaujah seems to love working with this creative team and his fellow company members at the Al Hirschfeld.
“I absolutely adore my colleagues — the ones on stage and the ones behind the scenes and those who are in front of us, giving us instruction and crafting what this piece has become,” he said proudly. “We were very fortunate last summer to premiere the work in Boston and to have those months outside New York in a smaller town. We were each other’s main point of contact during that period, and one of the things I tried to do while we were in Boston was to facilitate time away from the stage where we could all get together and just enjoy each other’s company, be that at a local pub or a concert or at the harbor eating oysters and drinking wine or someone’s house. Because in one regard after working in ensembles for years I do realize the importance of creating that bond. But also in the role of Toulouse-Lautrec, a rallying voice for the denizens of Montmartre at that time, a part of the responsibility I felt in that role was to try to facilitate not just the coming together but to sort of be a pied piper in that facilitation process because my hope was that that would later translate on stage in the way that we deal with each other and also in the way that we consider our associative roles as friends, colleagues and storytellers.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Moulin Rouge!, featuring Sahr Ngaujah, is now playing the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on Broadway. Click here for more information and tickets.
