Four Musicals on Three Continents: An Australian Company’s Big Bet

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/theater/king-kong-broadway-global-creatures.html

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Before the giant ape and the cancan chorus, before the daydreaming misfit and the defiant dancer, before even the dinosaurs and the dragons, first there were the RVs.

Manufacturing campers made Gerry Ryan a very wealthy man, one of the richest people in Australia. He built an empire based on caravaning — that’s what Australians call the popular pastime — and then invested in cycling, thoroughbreds, wine, soccer, basketball, technology and art.

Now he is placing a bold bet on musical theater.

Global Creatures, the Sydney-based company he founded and chairs, is producing its first four musicals. On three continents. At the same time.

“Moulin Rouge!” starts previews in Boston on July 10, and “King Kong” on Broadway in October. “Strictly Ballroom” opened in April in London’s West End, and “Muriel’s Wedding” begins its commercial life in Sydney next summer.

All four titles are most familiar as movies, and each has an Australian connection. They are being financed, in part, by revenue from the company’s first entertainment venture, the wildly successful arena show “Walking With Dinosaurs,” which features 18 life-size animatronic creatures and has grossed $455 million over a decade of tours.

The financial risks, which the company shares with investors in the productions, are considerable. The four productions are expected to cost about $75 million to mount — “King Kong” alone is budgeted for up to $36.5 million, and “Moulin Rouge!” for up to $28 million, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“These are ambitious projects, they’re high-profile projects, and they’re big budgets,” Carmen Pavlovic, the hard-charging chief executive of Global Creatures and the lead producer of the four shows, said. “If I start to think about it, I get nervous. But I don’t let myself start to think about it.”

The shows are off to an uneven start. “Muriel’s Wedding” had a positively reviewed — and sold-out — premiere production at the nonprofit Sydney Theater Company last winter, and seems to have significant promise in Australia and beyond. But “Strictly Ballroom,” even after developmental runs in Sydney; Leeds, England; and Toronto, was panned by key critics in London.

“King Kong” and “Moulin Rouge!” are bigger productions — “Kong” requires 13 people just to operate the ape — with bigger question marks.

“Kong” had one pre-Broadway outing, in Melbourne in 2013, where its 20-foot-tall animatronic ape thrilled theatergoers, but the storytelling left critics cold. Since that time the production has tossed aside writers and directors like — well, like you would expect from King Kong.

The show is arriving on Broadway after a decade of development, and about five years later than once seemed possible. The story has been rewritten by Jack Thorne, who just won a Tony Award for “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”

“Moulin Rouge!,” which is aiming for Broadway next season, is the first Global Creatures show to begin outside Australia, and has not yet had a production, so anything is possible. But expect it to look dazzling, reflecting what its director, Alex Timbers, calls “deluxe maximalism.”

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There have been bumps already. In early June a steel grid support weakened inside the just-renovated Emerson Colonial Theater in Boston, forcing a two-week delay for “Moulin Rouge!,” with the attendant headaches for ticketbuyers and the cast. And one can sense a certain degree of anticipatory schadenfreude on Broadway, where “King Kong,” because of the level of spectacle and spending, is, sight unseen, already drawing comparisons to the high-flying but ill-fated “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.”

“I’m no expert on Broadway, but I’ve certainly got the impression that out-of-towners get a slightly rougher ride when they come in and try to open something,” said Marius de Vries, a British composer and record producer who has written some of the music for “King Kong.” “I’m intrigued to see how this plays out.”

At the same time, Australian theatermakers, who have long endured a commercial scene overwhelmingly dominated by musicals imported from Broadway and the West End, are delighted by Global Creatures’s rare effort to nurture and export large-scale shows. And Australian state governments have supported the shows — as they have done for other commercial productions — with monetary and marketing help.

“Everyone is looking at them and saying, ‘Thank God,’” Simon Phillips, a prominent Australian director who is leading the development of “Muriel’s Wedding,” said. “They’ve got a cash cow in the animatronics, and they don’t actively need theater, but they believe in it.”

Mr. Ryan, who is now 67, funded and co-produced the original “Walking With Dinosaurs” arena show, which began performances in 2007, based on a popular BBC television series.

The show proved to be a huge success, but a managerial headache, and that’s why Mr. Ryan, who was busy running his caravan company, Jayco Australia, recruited Ms. Pavlovic to oversee the animatronics.

Ms. Pavlovic, who is 49, is from Australia and had spent years working in theater production in Sydney and London, first at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group and then at Stage Entertainment, where she headed international production. She set up “Cats” in Russia, “The Lion King” in France, and “Dirty Dancing” in Germany. She also knew quite a bit about “Walking With Dinosaurs” because she is married to the show’s scenic designer, Peter England (now the set designer for “King Kong”).

Ms. Pavlovic agreed to run the company on one condition: in addition to the animatronics business, she wanted to produce traditional theater.

“I didn’t want to just create shows about creatures,” she said. “And I didn’t want to just replicate Broadway and the West End, which is what every other producer does.”

Mr. Ryan agreed, and she moved back from London to help buy out the other “Walking With Dinosaurs” producers and set up Global Creatures. Mr. Ryan and Ms. Pavlovic jointly own the company, which has 22 employees in Sydney, London and New York. (The animatronics division, which also created a “How to Train Your Dragon” arena show, is now separate.)

The first target, Ms. Pavlovic thought, seemed obvious. Given that Global Creatures had developed expertise building robotic beasts, why not start with one of the most famous man vs. animal stories of the last century, “King Kong,” about a gorilla who is enchanted by an actress, captured by a showman, and taken from his Skull Island home to face captivity and then death at the top of the Empire State Building.

The project has been long, exciting and troubled, as a succession of creative teams have struggled with how to build a musical around a title character who is visually mesmerizing and emotionally compelling, but can’t speak, sing or dance. Among those who have come and gone are the writers Craig Lucas and Marsha Norman, the directors Daniel Kramer and Eric Schaeffer, as well as the pop star Sarah McLachlan and the Tony-winning composer Jason Robert Brown, each of whom contributed songs along the way.

As the show prepared for Broadway, Ms. Pavlovic brought on a veteran American producer, Roy Furman, who had been looking for a large-scale musical to champion.

“I’ve just noticed that while there are lots of artistic shows that are doing beautifully, there is an audience for big-scale productions — something people can’t see at home — if done right,” he said. “And ‘Spider-Man’ was instructive. Even with all its problems, it was the third-highest-grossing show when it was running.”

Every member of the current creative team interviewed said they had been skeptical until they saw Kong himself.

“This wasn’t on my radar — doing a big musical with a massive puppet — but as soon as I saw what they’d built, I couldn’t turn it down,” Mr. Thorne, the writer, said. He, like other members of the team, said he had been approached out of the blue by Ms. Pavlovic — in his case, by email — and was taken by her gumption and candor.

“She was saying ‘Kong’ hadn’t worked out in a number of iterations, and the thing I loved most was the risk — risk that she celebrated,” Mr. Thorne said. “I didn’t even look at the previous scripts — I’m sure they were magnificent, but I wanted a blank page.”

The musical is set in the 1930s — on Skull Island, in New York, and aboard a ship — but Mr. Thorne’s book is reframed for contemporary sensibilities, and new songs by the Australian musician Eddie Perfect range from dance hall to swing to rhythm and blues. “Every song is like an anthem, to success or to failure or to change,” Mr. Perfect said. “It’s big, because everything about the show is very big — big ideas, big puppetry, big statements.”

Kong is now a victim, not a monster, and the actress, Ann Darrow, is characterized by ambition and anguish, not simply screams. Also noteworthy: Christiani Pitts, the actress playing her, is African-American, and the cast is diverse, significant given that the story has long been seen as having racially problematic undercurrents.

While working on “King Kong,” Ms. Pavlovic heard that Baz Luhrmann, the visionary Australian director and writer, was looking to sell the stage rights to some of his film titles. They had lunch in Sydney, and in 2009 negotiated a deal for Global Creatures to adapt “Strictly Ballroom,” a 1992 movie about a competitive ballroom dancer who refuses to follow championship rules, and “Moulin Rouge!,” a 2001 work about a writer who falls for a courtesan.

Mr. Luhrmann, who fended off earlier offers from other production companies, said he liked that Global Creatures was Australian, was impressed that Mr. Ryan “had the stamina to stand by a show until he got it right,” and appreciated Ms. Pavlovic’s “very intense enthusiasm.”

Though he directed the initial stage adaptation of “Strictly Ballroom” in 2014, subsequent productions were directed by a young British choreographer, Drew McOnie, who is now also directing “Kong.”

Mr. Luhrmann said he had learned a lesson: “I’m either going to spend the rest of my life looking after the canon of work I’ve made, or I should surrender it to a younger generation and let them interpret as I go on to the rest of my journey.” He has taken only an advisory role with “Moulin Rouge!” — he calls himself “Dear Old Uncle Baz” — which, despite being set in Paris, is the most American of the projects.

The director, Mr. Timbers, is highly regarded for his adventurous approach to theatermaking; the book writer is John Logan, a Tony winner for “Red,” and the choreographer, Sonya Tayeh, has a fan base thanks to her work on “So You Think You Can Dance.” Aaron Tveit, Karen Olivo and Danny Burstein are among the stars.

The “Moulin Rouge!” movie, which starred Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, was a trippy sensation, nominated for eight Academy Awards and winning two, and the stage adaptation shares its sumptuous aesthetic. An 18-foot-high elephant and a 17-foot-high windmill (both icons of the Moulin Rouge cabaret) flank the stage. Satine, one of the main characters, makes her entrance flying in from above.

And although the show is set in 1899, its soundscape is contemporary — the movie featured 20th-century pop songs, and the musical will add 21st-century favorites.

“Muriel’s Wedding,” which is Global Creatures’s biggest critical success to date, came about almost as an afterthought, while the other shows were in early stages. “I was puttering around a bookshop to go and have a little think, and I found a book on ‘Muriel’s Wedding,’” Ms. Pavlovic said.

She remembered the fondness for the 1994 film, which is about an awkward but determined young woman from a small town in Australia, and reached out to the screenwriter and director, P.J. Hogan, to ask for the rights. That proved straightforward, but getting the rights to Abba’s music — Muriel is obsessed with the group, whose songs make up an important part of the show’s score — was more complicated, and ultimately negotiated in a trip to Stockholm.

Frustrated by a lack of available theater space in Australia and interested in the potential financial and artistic advantages of working with a nonprofit — as is often done in the United States and Britain — Global Creatures decided to develop the show with the Sydney Theater Company.

That nonprofit run of “Muriel’s Wedding” ended in January; the show is now being tweaked in anticipation of its commercial run in Australia next year, and Ms. Pavlovic said she hoped it would have a life outside Australia, although she doesn’t know where or when. (Financial realities demand that big shows made in Australia travel to recoup their investments: “There aren’t enough human beings in Australia to buy tickets to justify the cost of developing a musical,” Mr. Perfect, the songwriter, said.)

There is more to come. Ms. Pavlovic said Global Creatures was partnering with the Old Vic Theater in London on a project she declined to describe. “There’s no end to the things I want the company to do,” she said.

Mr. Ryan has given little artistic input into the shows; many of those working on them have never met him, and some have never heard of him. But he does cheer on the cast and creative artists; he is planning to visit New York soon to check out development on “King Kong,” and said he was confident of success.

“I’m a long-term investor,’’ he said. “I know this is risky, but the higher the returns, the riskier it is.”