Moulin Rouge! The Musical will play its final Broadway performance at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on July 26, closing out the last new production from the pandemic-disrupted 2019–20 season. The end of the New York run matters because the show became both a commercial success and a rare survivor of Broadway’s shutdown, reshaping expectations for large-scale jukebox musicals in a post-pandemic market.
The production first opened at the Hirschfeld on July 25, 2019, then shut down with all Broadway shows on March 12, 2020, as theaters went dark. Performances resumed on Sept. 24, 2021, and the show remained a box-office fixture until this summer.
Financially, the musical was a high-risk, high-reward project: it was financed to a reported ceiling of about $28 million and converted the Hirschfeld into a nightclub-like setting meant to evoke Paris. That gamble paid off — the production recouped its initial investment by late 2022.
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Attendance has stayed strong even in its final weeks; last week the show ran at roughly 92 percent capacity. The cast rotated frequently, drawing high-profile names from television, pop music and drag performance, including current players such as Bob the Drag Queen, pop singer JoJo and actor-singer Tituss Burgess.
Moulin Rouge! The Musical was led on stage by director Alex Timbers, with a book by John Logan, choreography by Sonya Tayeh and music supervision and arrangements by Justin Levine. The Broadway production collected 10 Tony Awards, among them Best Musical during a shortened awards season.
Beyond Broadway, the show has continued as a global franchise: a North American tour is on the road, and productions or productions-in-adaptation run in London’s West End, Germany, Korea, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Italy. The musical first premiered in the summer of 2018 at the Emerson Colonial Theatre in Boston.
Carmen Pavlovic, a lead producer, described bringing the film to the stage as a singular opportunity and thanked original filmmakers Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin for their collaboration. She said the team plans to use the remaining six months before closing to honor the artists and crew who sustained the production eight times a week.
The announcement leaves several practical questions for the Hirschfeld’s calendar and for Broadway employers: which production will succeed a show that transformed the theater’s look and ran for nearly seven years including the pandemic pause, and how producers will balance large-scale investment risk with changing audience patterns.
Quick facts
- Final Broadway performance: July 26 (Al Hirschfeld Theatre)
- Initial Broadway opening: July 25, 2019
- Pandemic shutdown: March 12, 2020; resumed Sept. 24, 2021
- Capitalization: up to about $28 million
- Recouped: late 2022
- Awards: 10 Tony Awards, including Best Musical
- Global presence: touring North America; productions in West End, Germany, Korea, Netherlands, Scandinavia and Italy
For audiences, the closing means one last chance to see a production that married familiar pop songs with a lavish visual concept. For the industry, its run will be studied as an example of how a risky, branded musical can survive — and thrive — through seismic disruption.
