Set against the sleaze and glamour of Paris in the late 1800s, Limelight Theatre’s new production of Nouveau Moulin Rouge – loosely inspired by the famous film – is a classic French love story set in the iconic cabaret venue and promises to be a “musical extravaganza”, according to the show’s creators.
Eight years in the making, the show has had “the gestation of an elephant,” laughs director Chas Hamilton.
Producer Jane Wilding first suggested the idea in 2017, after they worked together on a Phnom Penh Players’ production of MacBeth, but back then Chas felt a musical would be too ambitious an undertaking. Fast forward two years, he was testing the water by writing and directing the slightly more manageable musical theatre production, Shanghai Cabaret, By the time pandemic hit, the idea for Moulin Rouge had taken root and two years ago, Chas started the arduous task of writing a script from scratch that draws inspiration from the visually extravagant Baz Lurhmann film but with entirely new storylines and dialogue that bring alive big characters in an intimate space (“I think we’re on version 39!” says Chas). By late last year, Limelight Theatre was ready to start holding open auditions – Chas says he was “blown away” by the talent walking in – and the production went through another metamorphosis, as the cast fed back their suggestions to hone the characters and get the choice of songs just right.
“I’m a very collaborative director,” says Chas. “A lot of writers are very precious, like ‘don’t change my script!’ Whereas I think you have to be collaborative, because the actors are the people who are inhabiting the characters and bringing them to life. On stage, they own the characters, and I’m just the facilitator.”
While some elements of the play are drawn from the source material – four characters and four songs, to be precise – Chas is very clear that this production is very much its own beast and audience members shouldn’t expect to see a recreation of Baz Luhrmann’s vision, “because it’s certainly not that!”
“What I wanted to do is to reimagine the backstory of Moulin Rouge. I spent a lot of time research the history of the period, the 1890s,” says Chas. While the result contains plenty of historical references, he says, at its core it is “still a love story”
Moulin Rouge is the first production by the new Limelight Theatre group, set up by Chas and the producer Jane Wilding.
This comes off the back of a long career in the arts for Chas, who studied drama at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama alongside acting heavyweights Robert Carlyle and Alan Cumming, before setting up a youth theatre group in Scotland and then spending 27 years at the BBC.
He started out at the BBC’s World Service radio, then producing sound effects for radio drama, working with actors like Julie Christie and Michael Gambon – “a wonderful place to work,” he says – before news reading, presenting, and producing radio promotions for BBC Scotland. But after a cancer diagnosis, Chas found himself asking, “what am I doing?” and in 2001 left the UK on a BBC secondment to Ethiopia, setting up a media health campaign before going on to work in Nepal, Cambodia, and Vietnam. In 2003, he set up BBC Media Action’s HIV and maternal & child health campaign in Cambodia, and spent many years training Cambodian radio producers, many of whom “went on to do great things, winning awards,” before he become the organisation’s country director. Finally, after a brief stint in Vietnam, Chas retired early from the BBC 10 years ago and decided to use his free time to “get back to his creative roots,” jumping back into theatre and working on a string of shows with the Phnom Penh Players before setting up his own theatre group.
“The idea for Limelight was to get new people involved in an empty space and make great theatre happen, he says. With just a handful of others in the city, he says, “I just thought, there’s plenty of room for another wee community theatre group, you know?”
As for Nouveau Moulin Rouge, Chas says audiences can expect “a lot of humour” as well as “some really vile, exaggerated characters” and a clever script with a lot of references, “some that people will get, some they won’t.”
Most importantly, though, he says, “I want the audience to laugh and cry and to have a little bit of escapism, and to feel moved. And for it to be a magical theatrical experience.”
But a word of warning: if you want to catch one of the three shows, you’ll have to get in fast. “We’re going to be sold out!” says Chas.