Moulin Rouge! The Musical
Set construction and set electrics from TSA's scenic workshop. The staircase and rostra from Show Works, now part of TSA. Every drape and banquette from Reveal. One production, delivered across its Australian run.
The heart portals, the tracked show deck, the staircase, the show curtain, the festoon canopy, the banquettes and the masking all came out of TSA's workshops. Select a point to see what we built.
Moulin Rouge! The Musical
The full scenic and soft-goods package for Moulin Rouge! The Musical - set construction, set electrics, every soft good and a touring-ready build - with the Melbourne half delivered through 18 months of lockdowns.
Three workshops, one job. TSA's scenic team built and wired the hard set. Show Works - now part of TSA - fabricated the staircase and rostra. Reveal cut, sewed and upholstered every soft good.
Stage opened on schedule. Show built to tour.
This had more drapery and upholstery than any other production we've ever worked on. During lockdowns, we had to keep shifting how and where we worked. But the team pushed through and delivered stunning results.
TSA's workshops were contracted across the Australian production of Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Set construction and set electrics from the scenic workshop - the heart portals, the tracked show deck, the trucked scenic units. Every soft good from Reveal - stage drapes, soft scenery, upholstered banquettes and full auditorium dressing, plus a parallel set built to tour.
The soft-goods brief landed alongside Melbourne's rolling lockdowns. Curfews, workplace caps, stop-start manufacturing schedules. International fabric freight delayed by flight shortages. The opening date did not move.
Reveal's drape team cut, stitched and finished every piece in-house at the workshop, then split production into satellite rooms when caps reduced floor staffing. Upholsterers took builds home and continued in garages and driveways. The line never stopped, only relocated.
With studios closed for in-person review, the design team and Reveal crew finalised drape layouts and fabric calls inside the Regent Theatre foyer, the largest legal workspace on tap. Saree fabric, banquette swatches and layout drawings were checked under stage-adjacent light, not studio fluorescents.
Fabric was rerouted around flight shortages and freight pinch points. Upholstered banquettes were finished kerbside when site access was restricted. Soft scenery delivered piece-by-piece into the Regent build window the moment crews could occupy the auditorium. Bump-in held its date.
The hard set came out of TSA's scenic workshop. Three flown heart portals. An aluminium show deck with tracked panels and lighting troughs built through the floor. The show portal, the sliders, the trucked units - Satine's room, the garret, the Eiffel towers. Built, wired and scenic-finished under one roof.
Each heart portal spans 14.4 metres and stands 9.5 metres tall - an aluminium frame with laser-cut filigree, clad in twin-wall polycarbonate and dressed in printed cloth with red satin pleats. The filigree hearts were cut, sculpted, textured and painted gold in the workshop, then fitted to their frames as three separate flying units.
Set electrics ran through everything. Filigree LED tape, LED neon and chase bulbs through the portals. Lighting troughs through the show deck. Battery-powered trucks on wireless DMX, so scenic units move without a cable in sight. More than 25 set-electrics plates were built, wired and commissioned alongside the carpentry - one workshop, both trades.
The staircase and rostra package came from Show Works, whose team and assets are now part of TSA: multi-tiered rostra with embedded LED, Victorian balustrades sculpted by hand, cast in resin and painted antique gold, and ornate steel stair treads water-jet cut for the mezzanines. The same hands and the same machines now work under the TSA roof.
From the heart portals, the tracked show deck and the staircase to the red proscenium drapery, the festoon canopy, the upholstered booths and the auditorium dressing - the hard set, the set electrics and every soft good in the Australian Moulin Rouge! seasons were built between TSA's scenic workshop, Show Works and the Reveal team. Stage opened on schedule. The production has since toured, and the same workshops continue to service the original build and manufacture for the next season of major musicals.
The drapes and upholstery for this production are written up from the workshop side, fabric by fabric, on the Reveal Productions site.
Two films from the production's own channel. The first runs through the day on stage as the soft goods went in. The second steps wider, behind the curtain, across the season.
Theatre, touring, themed entertainment. The discipline is the same. If you have a production that has to land first time, talk to us.