Interview: Gabe Martinez of MOULIN ROUGE at Saenger Theatre

The Saenger Theatre invites everyone to can-can now through April 16 as the present MOULIN ROUGE! THE MUSICAL. Baz Luhrmann's iconic film comes to life onstage, remixed in a new musical mashup extravaganza. Moulin Rouge! The Musical is a theatrical celebration of Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Love. Moulin Rouge! The Musical is the winner of ten 2021 Tony Awards, including Best Musical, two Drama League Awards, Outstanding Production of a Musical, five Drama Desk Awards, and 10 Outer Critics Circle Award Honor citations New Broadway Musical. As in the film, Moulin Rouge! The Musical celebrates over 160 years of music - from Offenbach to Lady Gaga. The stage musical features many of the movie's iconic songs and includes recent hits released since the movie premiered 21 years ago. BroadwayWorld.com sat down with actor Gabe Martinez (Santiago) about his character's expanded role and the updated mashups for the musical.

BroadwayWorld.com: What inspired you to become an actor?
Martinez: I come from a family of musicians, actors and performers. My parents met doing a tiny little off-off-Broadway show their friend wrote in the '70s. So, it's baked in for me. I did shows in school and everything when I wasn't playing sports, and I went to school for theatre at Muhlenberg College. I played one year of football there and was injured, so I decided to take the less impactful route. After that, I went on cruise ships, sang at weddings, and did shows occasionally, so it's always been in that sort of sphere. And honestly, I've never been good at anything else, so I'm very glad this thing is working out for me.

BWW: How did you get the role of Santiago?
Martinez: Well, coming out of the pandemic, well, I should say still in the pandemic when I was starting to try to get back into auditioning, and things were beginning to open up again, my agents tried to get me in for this, and I had a friend in casting who thought I would be very, very good for this role and I didn't know the movie very well and since MOULIN ROUGE debuted pretty soon before the pandemic. So, it had little time to get its legs before everything shut down. And as I understand it, they had cast most of our cast before the shutdown, so everyone was just waiting and waiting for the green light to go ahead and start things up again. And I was cast pretty late in the game. They had a bit of a hard time finding their Santiago. The stars all aligned, I was getting in for a couple of auditions, and they cast me in July of 2021 and January of last year, and we got started. It was a consonance of some fortunate happenstances because this kind of opportunity is a long shot. I had never done an equity gig before, so this was my first real serious theatre gig. My work before this was very fulfilling and wonderful, but this was hit the ground running with a serious musical theatre gig.

BWW: Do you have a history with MOULIN ROUGE that you want to share?
Martinez: I didn't have a particular relationship with the movie; I've only ever seen it once before I got cast. I think I may be unique to the rest of the cast; everyone else in the show knows it very well, so I was able to come into it clear. I don't have a relationship with the script's source material, so I'm invested in the musical. That is the prime Moulin Rouge for me. I have such a love for the show. It's my favorite show I've ever seen or done, and I'll do it forever. I'll do it until they beg me to leave.

BWW: Is Santiago an original character for the show?
Martinez: Well, in the movie, this character exists but does not have a name. He's in the credits as the Narcoleptic Argentinian. They did me a favor when they redid the role for the show. The group of Bohemians in the movie is seven or eight, and they all have bit parts, and only a couple of them are named, and they pared that down for the show. It's only Toulouse-Lautrec, an actual historical figure, and Santiago. Santiago existed in the movie; his name and character are more of a creation for this show. They have removed, thank goodness, the narcolepsy from this character, so I don't have to be passing out on stage. Fans of the movie will know him for seeing the Roxanne number in the third act of the 2001 movie. I don't sing Roxanne in the show; they've given me another solo, which is, spoiler alert, the best thing I have ever done on a stage; it opens Act II. Christian does sing Roxanne, and I do the tango with the character Nini played by Libby Lloyd.

BWW: How was Santiago's role expanded for the show?
Martinez: I was able to speak to the creative team during the rehearsal process. In January, we had all the original Tony winners working with us for this rehearsal, and it had a lot to do with paring down the size of the ensemble cast because you want to be able to fill the stage, but you don't want too much going on and want people to have a chance to shine. So as I understood, they pared back that group of bohemians. Santiago was the last man up because of the Roxanne number in the original movie and how much everyone loved it, and that resulted in a secondary romance story with Nini, who, in the movie, she is the dancer who backstabs Satine and screws over everyone in the company, but they don't make Nini do that in the show, which I love. So, we're sort of the B romance, Nini and I, and it's wonderful; it went from kind of a bit part that didn't have a name to a character who affects the plot and supports the other featured principles and has some great moments of his own.

BWW: I would be remiss if I didn't speak about the music. Moulin Rouge was my first experience with mashups, even before Glee. I saw there are 78 songs in the show. Was the music updated for a modern audience?
Martinez: There are plenty of new songs and a lot of what people will recognize from the film. I would say the split is about 60/40, maybe closer to 50/50. Our wonderful composer, the Tony winner Justin Levine spoke to us in rehearsals about the selection process and how they pared it down from over 100 songs to the ones they needed to keep. It's just such an opportunity for him to select as a composer. Still, it's so successful because audiences who may not necessarily be into musical theatre will recognize most of the songs in the show. It's a real joy to be up onstage and hear people gasp in excitement when they recognize their favorite song. They picked up on something special with this because not all interpolated musicals do that. In this way, they're picked from all over, and the catalog spans something like 80 years, from Nat King Cole to Shut Up and Dance With Me. If you remember the experience of watching the movie for the first time with Baz Luhrmann's wild camera angles, bright colors, and dizzying whiplash effect, they've really done a great job in recreating that for the stage show, and a lot of that has to do with the music and Justin Levine's mashups. I think people respond so well to it. The people who are expecting it are blown away, and their expectations are exceeded, and people who don't know what they're in for are just completely emerged in this world.

BWW: How does using music like that forward the plot?
Martinez: There's such a big catalog to draw from... there are 78 songs in the show, and of course, there are 78 fully produced numbers, but one of the really clever things they've done is just to take a snippet from a song or just one recognizable musical moment. So no pop song from the last century is safe. This is why it's so clever what they do. They sometimes use one little recognizable musical line to get their point across; in that way, they keep the energy moving musically and give the audience something to giggle at.