That was very much something that came out of the workshop process."
So if a simple duet wasn’t enough, what would be?
“You have to top ‘Your Song’ somehow,” muses Pearce.
Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor in 2001’s ‘Moulin Rouge!'.Everett Collection
“What could top it?
A medley of the greatest love songs of the 20th century, at least the ’80s and ’90s.
We wrote it as a debate about idealism versus realism, about love versus reality.”
Karen Olivo and Aaron Tveit in the Broadway production of ‘Moulin Rouge!'.© Matthew Murphy, 2019
In short, they decided that they could be heroes…for ever and ever.
Once this approach was settled on, Luhrmann needed a list of potential songs.
“I was like, ‘I’m never going to be able to do it.
Every second song is about love.'”
Monsted didn’t have Spotify or even iTunes to discover songs he might have forgotten while compiling his list.
“It really was sitting around and going, ‘What about ‘I Will Always Love You?’
‘Yeah that’s a good one, write that down.'”
Ultimately, music director Justin Levine decided to leave the bones of the original piece alone.
Levine wanted to amp up Satine’s anti-love songs to further foreground her pragmatic view of romance.
“It was always lyrics first,” he says.
“It felt very important that whatever we were doing felt organic to the character that was singing it.
Basically, the idea was that as you read those lyrics, it read like an argument.”
