#if he applied himself more he might be able to become a lord of frenzy

[leal-hound]

hey man your brother is kinda harshing the vibe

[janekfan]

ooooh..... difficult anniversary and/or you’re not human anymore bingo prompts for jarchivist obliteration?

AAAA This took so long! I am SO SORRY!!! <3 <3 <3

https://archiveofourown.org/works/31123295

Jon was used to hurting.

Used to hiding.

Which is why he didn’t notice. Didn’t understand what was happening to him and more importantly why.

A panic attack here. A bad day there. A cold, maybe? Until the scars on his skin from the worms and the corkscrew and the scratching woke one day as though they were fresh and new. His skin crawled, the slightest touch filled him with revulsion and, lord, he had to keep it together because Martin would almost certainly overreact and Jon hated, hated to be the source of his worry.

So he would ignore it as usual.

Whatever it was would pass. And he could avoid being the center of attention for this thing that was out of their control. He’d read the Lord of the Rings. He knew about the less romantic side of anniversaries. What was one more thing for him to overcome?

It didn’t stop them from hurting like the day they were drawn on his body and while the rents in his skin looked the same as they ever did, he nearly bloodied himself after a particularly wretched nightmare with his frenzied clawing.

And it passed. The burning, bleeding, boring sensations disappeared and Martin hadn’t suspected a thing. Okay, that was a lie. But he seemed mollified enough when Jon wrote it off as a tough week at university.

“I’m just tired, habibi.” He forced himself to reach for Martin’s hands, sighing in gusty relief when everything was normal and allowing himself to get wrapped up in warm arms.

The mark left behind by the Distortion ached deep and throbbing and somehow also elsewhere. It was a phantom pain traveling the myriad corridors of his veins, his arteries, his nerves and when he couldn’t rid himself of it in any conventional way, he waited. It would pass. It would. Just like the last one. This was just pain. He knew pain. Was fast friends with it by now and this was nothing like his worst days.

“Jon-darling?”

“Mm?” He was flipping through the pages in a book, not too fast, not too slow, not really reading anything, trying to pretend that everything was normal when his foot cramped up like he’d been bitten. He was practiced now in not looking; there wouldn’t be anything there anyway. His skin might as well have been a great big door and the only way through to the other side didn’t involve knocking.

“You look pale.” Ah. Well. Pain like this would do that to a man.

“Just a little sore today, love.” It wasn’t a lie. Jon set the book aside, not bothering to mark whatever random page he’d landed on, and threaded their fingers together.

“I knew I shouldn’t have let you talk me into carrying the shopping.”

“What are you talking about? I always help carry the shopping.” Despite his chronic conditions, Jon pulled his own weight.

No, stop. Of course you do and you have nothing to prove, especially not to Martin of all people.

“You’ve been run down.”

“I have not!” Martin fixed him with a stern look and he cowed under his scrutiny. “Perhaps a bit, but you know how these things go.”

“I do. And I can’t help but feel like there’s something you aren’t telling me.” Here it was. Martin’s overture, his olive branch. His invitation to come clean and tell the truth and avoid his wrath when he found out later. But Jon never was a quick learner of these social lessons.

“I’m fine, hayati.” Jon soothed, tipping Martin into his newly throbbing shoulder. “I’m fine.”

The next three hit him like a lorry, nearly as hard as they had a year ago and nearly all at once.

His burn scar, just like the worm scars, felt blistered as badly as the day he’d taken Jude’s hand, and he shook violently at the onset of it, thankful he was squirreled away in his office at the University and not crying into Martin’s shirt even if that’s where he’d prefer to be but Martin hates burns.

Hates how they look, how twisted and ugly they become when they scar.

Burns made him upset. Burns made him sick.

He hates them. Hates them. And while Jon was reasonably sure Martin would never turn him away when he was hurting like this, the fluttering undercurrent chanting what if wouldn’t leave him be.

So Instead he sniffled away in the dark, wrist pressed between his knees in a vain attempt to stop the shaking while he tried to remember how to breathe.

It was dark when he slipped into bed beside Martin, dead asleep after a run of night shifts. For a frantic moment Jon wanted to shake him awake, beg for reasurances, for relief, but it would ruin this. Martin looked so peaceful, face relaxed in repose, cheek soft when Jon pressed his trembling lips there.

“Jon... ?” Washing out on a swirling tide his voice was fuzzy, thick with exhaustion, and the hand that brushed the small of his back lingered only for the time it took for him to drift back under. No. He’d wrought enough damage here. Better for Martin to rest without worry. He shouldn’t have to deal with Jon and his problems. Especially when they would be arriving like clockwork for the rest of his life. Jon pressed himself against Martin’s warmth, trying to soak it up, stop the shivering. How could he be so frozen when his whole right arm was engulfed in flame? Silent, he let the tears come, closing his eyes against a burgeoning dizziness he knew would only grow worse.

Be quiet. Just be quiet. Don’t disturb him, you mustn’t. You’ve nothing else to give except more burdens that aren’t his to carry.

The ceiling was spinning so fast above him; lights, cast shadows, cabinets whirling, reeling, spiraling so much he’d be sick with it any minute. The vibrations from Martin’s pounding footsteps resonated through the whole of him, pulsing, in time with his uneven battering pulse.

He barely remembered the actual fall, just the terrifying sensation of being weightless and the fear welling in his throat like coagulated ink. Forever. He’d be falling forever. Nothing to hold. To grab. To slow. To Know.

Endless.

His scream wrenched away from him in the rushing winds filling up his ears, stealing his voice, his breath. No one could hear him in this place. Martin would never know what happened. That Jon was eaten up by the sky. Surrounded infinitely on all sides by a sea of simultaneous nonexistence and brutal presence. Jon’s awareness whittled down only to the pull of gravity in all the wrong directions.

“Jon!” A bleary shape manifested above him, blocking out the worst of it. Hands, gentle, probing, searching subconsciously for breaks, contusions, his training winning out over the panic Jon could just make out in the set of his mouth. Fingers ran soft through his curls, seeking out any swellings and Jon winced when he found one. Must’ve struck his head on the way down. Those cool hands settled, cupping his face, and twin thumbs brushed over his cheeks. “You’re warm, love.” A murmur, almost to himself as Martin puzzled.

“B’bit of, of vertigo, s’all.” Uncoordinated, Jon’s arm struck out as he tried to reach for him and landed on his wrist. “Tryin’...nnh.” He gripped Martin like a lifeline, slamming his eyes shut against the need to be ill.

“You’ve clocked yourself.” Fair enough. “But I think you’re alright. Think you can move?” With no other option than to speak lest he set it all swirling again, Jon whimpered. “Okay.” With one more pass through his hair Martin stepped away and soon enough had Jon settled as best he could on the tile, tucked beneath a blanket with a cold pack pressed to the back of his neck. Relief came gradually and Martin’s unasked questions lingered on the edges of their companionable silence. “Better?”

“Mm.” Despite the hard surface applied to every pressure point, Jon was falling asleep cocooned in the safety of Martin’s soothing company.

He wouldn’t be able to keep this up

Martin teased him mercilessly about the loss of his voice and Jon let him have it if it kept him from noticing how sore his throat really was. He wanted to tell him that it was Daisy’s mark, to cry and come clean and beg Martin to stay.

But that wouldn’t be fair. Jon had to be a whole person in this relationship and stop relying on Martin to pick up the slack. He would figure this out. He’d prove his past didn’t control him.

After he could get out of bed.

And here was what he’d strived to avoid. Finally laid low.

“I worry, Jon. You know that.” That was the problem. Martin was already going to be late to work from all his fussing. With the scrap of voice he’d gained back he protested in a hoarse whisper, syllables squeaking past what felt like a shredded voice box and listened to Martin call in again. He had to be better than this but he was overwrought, dangling at the end of a very frayed rope. This marked a sharp decline and Jon was sure it hadn’t escaped Martin’s notice that they were coming up on the date he’d more or less died. He could barely rouse himself in the mornings for school, drifting through lessons and relying more on his TA than he’d like. More than once he’d splurged on a cab, not sure if he’d make it on the tube and Martin’s fretting and worry and distress only made Jon more secure in his conviction. If it was this bad already, how bad would it become if he knew the reason it was all happening? They were supposed to be free of this. Jon wasn’t supposed to keep doing this to Martin.

Melanie’s scar throbbed, chipping away at any scant reserve he had left and ruthless with its aim. It was worse than Daisy’s even though he could understand both motivations. Daisy was putting down a monster. Mel was striking out at someone trying to help, driving home with the scalpel that no good deed goes unpunished. Rationally, he knew he’d deserved it. Too bad it didn’t dull the sting of it all really.

“Darling? Sweetheart?” Jon forced his eyes open, gasping when it sent the dark room to pirouetting, his stomach to churning, staging a mutiny against the scant meal he’d forced on himself not too long ago. Anything he’d gained in their short reprieve had long melted away under the stress. “I’m here, what’s wrong, love?”

“Nnothing…” he regretted the word as soon as it passed his lips.

“You’ve a fever so high it woke me. That’s not nothing, Jon.” Mercifully, he gave him a moment to gather his thoughts, catalogue how much more of this he could take before it broke him. Burned hand shaking, Jon clenched his fist which didn’t help the pain rocketing through his arm and into his heart, but steadied him.

“Jus’a, a bit of a flare up.” Those sometimes came with fevers.

“Oh, love. Why didn’t you say?”

Because it was a lie. Because I didn’t want you to worry. Because I never want to see you upset over me. Because I’m not worth it. Because if it’s always going to be like this--

“Din’t want you to, to…” The cramping agony slurred his voice badly, stringing syllables together with an uncooperative tongue was too much effort. “Nngh.” Dazed and groggy, Jon shut his eyes tightly, trying to focus on Martin’s soothing touch stroking over his face. Like a coward, Jon let sleep rescue him from the truth.

It was the flesh that gave him away.

Woke him screaming; hot and twisting in agony with Jared’s phantom fingers dug into his rib cage. More fingers clamped onto his shoulders, shaking him, a distorted voice calling, shouting his name over and over and over.

“Jon!” Martin was little more than a blur, obscured by tears, and Jon’s panic was reflected straight back at him. “Where does it hurt?”

“Wha…?”

“Where, habibi? Left, right? Please, Jon.”

“Not...not. S’not--” He couldn’t get the words to come, to admit after so long what he’d kept poorly hidden.

“Not what?” Frustration bled sideways into his words and Martin gripped him harder as though he might tear the answers out of him.

“Real.” It burst from him in a raw, somehow soft explosion. It wasn’t. Not really. The wounds were long healed over.

“Looks plenty real from here, Jon.” He batted away questing fingers.

“No. No.” There was no way he’d be able to explain through this piercing agony, the literal holes invisible in his skin.

“It’s the fears, isn’t it? Your marks, your scars.” Martin already knew judging by the disquiet in his tone. This was merely confirmation.

“Yes.” He sobbed.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” There was hurt in his voice, sadness and betrayal, alongside the ire.

“I thought, I thought--” Jon couldn’t breathe, panic and pain stealing the very air from his lungs. This was only going to get worse. After all they’d done, he’d done--how was he still a monster?

“Shh, shhh, thought what, love?” Martin held him carefully, mindful of all the ways Jon hurt, ticking off fears and scars on mental fingers, trying to figure out how long he’d been hiding it. How long he’d been suffering alone.

“Supposed to be, god, supposed to be safe, free of this.” He was trembling now, with chills or anxiety or both, gasping for every sip of oxygen and swallowing seawater for his trouble. “Can’t, what if--?” Choking himself off, Jon strangled. Martin stayed silent, rocking them both gently, back, forth, soft, slow, calm, calm, calm, and when Jon finally spoke again had to strain to hear him over the echo of a hammering heart beat. “Every year?”

Every year.

He couldn’t Breathe.

Everything was close. So close, too close, and he was crushed under the implications.

“Jon?” Now he was heaving for it, fast and deep, and while Martin could feel the strain it was to breathe he knew it wouldn’t be long before Jon lost consciousness altogether. “Hey, hey, listen, hayati, slow down, sloow down.” Jon’s entire body lifted when Martin inhaled, and again, and again, until he picked up the thread and made more than a half decent attempt. “Okay, there you are, you’re doing so well, sweetheart. So well.” Time passed in measured breaths, so much so that Martin had begun to think Jon had fallen asleep when:

“You’ll leave.”

Soft and shattered. All the fear that he’d piled onto the pain flowing out of him, a dam burst and broken.

“I won’t.” Jon’s movements were hard-won but he managed to shift himself enough to face him. His expression was firm.

“You, you can’t be stuck taking care of an i’invalid again, Martin. I won’t. I won’t have it.”

“Ah. You won’t have it.” Martin scoffed. “And what about me? When do I get a choice?” Jon, eyes wide and dark with exhaustion and pain, looked at him as though he’d grown a second head, perhaps a third.

Or like Martin was a predator and Jon was prey, cornered and hurting.

“You shouldn’t want this.” Me. “This, this burden. This trap!”

“You’re not some sort of trap!” Martin could see the moment Jon decided to change tactics, to try and convince him otherwise, win the game. Too bad for Jon that Martin knew him better than he knew himself.

“You want this don’t you?” He sneered, so convinced, and while once upon a time it would have made Martin wilt and retreat, now he was familiar with Jon’s lashing out. Sorry, Jon. “I won’t be another reason for you to martyr yourself.”

“And I won’t be scared off by your nasty attitude.” Softening, he reached for Jon’s trembling hands, running his thumbs methodically over the backs of them. “I won’t. Together. Right?”

“Martin.” His name broke open on a sob. “I don’t. I don’t want this for you.”

“Tough.” Smothered, Jon’s next words died in his throat, a fledgling bird crushed before it could take flight. “You don’t get to choose for me, even to protect me.”

“Every year--”

“We don’t know that. Not yet.” Martin eased him down. “You aren’t a burden. You aren’t trapping me here.” He kissed away the tears, the hopelessness, even as Jon shook his head nigh delirious.

“I am, I am.”

“No, love. What you are is worn out and hurting.” Martin teased out Jon’s tangled curls, stroking his fingers through them and watching him relax as much as he could at the moment. “What you’re going to do is let me take care of things. Of you, Jon.”

“Don’deserve you.” Fresh tears welled in half lidded brown eyes, slipped into the fly aways at his temples when they closed. “Never have.” Martin stood, pressing lips to his hot brow, intending to gather up anything he thought might help.

“We’ll talk when you’re feeling better.” Jon nodded and Martin turned to leave, stopping when he found himself caught by quaking fingers tangled in his sleeve.

“I, I love you.” Contrite, whispered and awaiting rejection. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, darling.” Martin leaned down, thumbing away new tears. “I know, I know and I love you too.” He stole one more shivering kiss. “Let’s get you taken care of.”

[moulinrougefanfanfans]

Moulin Rouge for VOGUE!

(These are the HQ Photo Versions!)

Moulin Rouge!’s Broadway cast, photographed at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn. Sittings Editors: Hamish Bowles, Alexandra Cronan. Produced by 360pm. Set Design: CJ Dockery at Mary Howard Studio; Costume Designer: Catherine Zuber; Choreographer: Sonya Tayeh

Photographed by Baz Luhrmann, Vogue, July 2019

July 2019 Vogue (Online)

BAZ LUHRMANN WAS BORN to reinvent the movie musical for a new generation—which is exactly what he did in 2001 with Moulin Rouge!, his deliriously romantic mash-up, set in 1890s Paris, of La Bohème, La Traviata, and the Orpheus myth, with a soundtrack that exploded with modern-day pop songs, lavish Technicolor sets and costumes (by his wife, Catherine Martin), and a hyperkinetic cinematic style that drew on MGM musicals, MTV videos, and Bollywood spectaculars. The motto of this blatantly artificial world, served with a knowing wink (which nevertheless swept us up in its very real, very breathless emotions), could be borrowed from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Enough! Or too much.”

In his own way, the brilliant theater director Alex Timbers—whose work includes Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, Here Lies Love, and, most recently, Beetlejuice—was born to reinvent Moulin Rouge! for the stage, as another generation of New York audiences will discover when his electrifying, eye-popping, and blissfully over-the-top adaptation of Luhrmann’s masterpiece opens on Broadway, after a smash run in Boston, this month.

“I’ve spent my life taking classics and interpreting them in radical ways,” Luhrmann says, “so how could I not applaud someone taking a work of mine and interpreting it in a radical way? You have to interpret things for the time and place you’re in. In the end, it’s still a tragic opera, but Alex applies himself to it in such a dexterous way that there’s irony and fun and music and emotion.”

Luhrmann grew up in Herons Creek, a tiny, remote Australian town with a total of seven houses in it, where, he says, “if you didn’t have a good imagination and an ability to create worlds in your mind, you were lost.” Fortunately his family, which ran a gas station and a pig farm, also ran the local movie theater and had a black-and-white TV set (which showed exactly one channel), and Luhrmann devoured a steady diet of old movies, including musicals, with which he fell in love. His mother was a ballroom-dance instructor who started giving him lessons early, and his father insisted that Luhrmann and his siblings study painting and music. Before long he was staging little shows, performing magic tricks, making films with his father’s 8-millimeter camera, and acting in school plays.

Apparently it was the ideal upbringing to produce an artist of dazzling originality, one with a singular, idiosyncratic vision and an expansive playing field: film, theater, opera, commercials, music videos, pop songs. After the success of his first two films, Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet—both of which had healthy doses of movie-musical DNA encoded into their cinematic language—Luhrmann wanted to take on the genre itself. He and his co-writer, Craig Pearce, set their film in Belle Epoque Paris, in and around the legendary Moulin Rouge nightclub, telling a tragic love story straight out of verismo opera with the Orpheus legend—a young poet and musician travels to the underworld in search of his dead love, Eurydice, and is reunited with her only to lose her again, emerging forever changed—as its mythical underpinning.

But Luhrmann also had what he calls a “preposterous conceit” that allowed his Orpheus—a Bohemian poet named Christian, played by Ewan McGregor—to metaphorically enchant the very rocks and stones to follow him because of his voice: “When our poet opens his mouth, ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music’ comes out of it,” he says. “Whether you like The Sound of Music or not, it’s a giant hit that’s got artistic cred—so it’s a funny, concise way of saying ‘The guy has magic.’” Preposterous or not, the conceit turned the love story between McGregor’s Christian and Nicole Kidman’s doomed Satine, a nightclub star and courtesan, into a pop fantasia, giving the music its audience had grown up with—from “Your Song” to “Lady Marmalade”—an operatic grandeur.

Luhrmann had long wanted to bring Moulin Rouge! to the stage but felt that he wasn’t the right person for the job—he worried that he was too close to the material and might be overprotective of it. Enter Alex Timbers, 40, a downtown wunderkind who has brought the cheeky, postmodern spirit of his theater company Les Freres Corbusier to Broadway and shares with Luhrmann a restlessly playful and inventive mise-en-scène. “When I saw Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, I could tell that his aesthetic and the way he told a story—very high-energy, very theatrical, ironic but also moving—had a certain kinship with mine,” Luhrmann says. “And after I met him, I knew that he would have his own interpretation but also understand the language of the film.”

The biggest challenge Timbers and his team faced was how to bring the film’s hypercinematic exuberance alive on a stage. “We had to create a visceral and kinetic excitement using an entirely theatrical vocabulary,” Timbers says. “We don’t have any of those virtuosic techniques like close-ups and Steadicam and music video–style editing, but you want the show to be able to leap over the footlights—emotionally, but also as a spectacle. So we use a lot of techniques to do that.”

Do they ever. From the moment you enter the theater, it’s clear that Timbers has realized his mandate to make the show—which he’s been working on for the past six years—“360.” It’s as if you’ve walked into the Moulin Rouge itself, courtesy of the gorgeously overwhelming set (by Derek McLane) that greets you: There are hearts within hearts, chandeliers, the stage flanked by a windmill on one side and an elephant on the other. Then out come the corset-clad boys and girls of the night (who come in all colors, shapes, and sizes) and the fashionable members of the Parisian demimonde in Catherine Zuber’s fabulous costumes. The next thing you know, “Four Bad Ass Chicks from the Moulin Rouge,” as the script identifies them—propelled onstage by Sonya Tayeh’s wildly exuberant choreography—are belting “Hey sista, go sista, soul sista, flow sista,” and we’re off to the races. “I wanted to build this exotic, intoxicating world that felt beautiful and dangerous and gritty and sexy,” Timbers says. “It felt really important for the sets and the costumes to use period elements, and for us to be ruthless about that, but to put them in a form that feels contemporary and surprising.”

The seven-time Tony-winning costume designer Zuber (The King and I, My Fair Lady) has done that and then some, tipping her hat to Catherine Martin’s designs for the film without imitating them. She’s even managed to design Belle Epoque finery that allows the dancers the freedom of movement to execute Tayeh’s propulsive choreography. Zuber is also a master of using costumes to reveal character and situation, as with the ornate gown she designed for Satine after she becomes the Duke’s courtesan and enters his glittering world. Inspired by designs from John Galliano’s 2006 couture collection, it features a bodice that looks like a cage and three rows of lacing down the back. “It’s almost like she’s a prisoner,” Zuber says.

Playing Satine this time around is Karen Olivo (West Side Story, Hamilton), who brings very different qualities to the role than Kidman, both physical (Olivo is a woman of color) and temperamental (desperate, determined, and down-to-earth, as opposed to ethereal). Aaron Tveit (Next to Normal, Catch Me if You Can), meanwhile, sings like a dream and brings the requisite dewy idealism to the naive Christian, but with a hint of something edgier.

The story is very much the same as the film’s: Satine is the star attraction at the Moulin Rouge, owned by the rapacious Harold Zidler (Danny Burstein), who is in financial hot water and in danger of losing the club. Christian and Satine meet and fall head over heels, but she has been promised by Zidler to the villainous Duke (Tam Mutu), who can give her the bejeweled life she’s always dreamed of, forcing her to choose between that and true love. Meanwhile, Christian and his pals Santiago and Toulouse-Lautrec (Ricky Rojas and Sahr Ngaujah) are writing a show, bankrolled by the Duke, that is meant to save the Moulin Rouge from going under. Then, of course, Satine has this persistent cough and . . . well, you know.

The big difference in terms of the storytelling is that book writer John Logan (Red) has fleshed out and deepened the characters and the relationships between them. “We looked at the major characters, asked what their backstories were, and tried to figure out how grounded they could possibly be in psychological realism and yet still be heightened in that way that musical theater demands,” Logan says. “How did Satine get to be this sparkling diamond—and what’s the price she’s paid along the way?”

But the boldest change—and in many ways the heart of the show—is in the new songs, which give Moulin Rouge! fresh emotional resonance (and whip the crowd into a frenzy). Along with the familiar Bowie, Madonna, and Elton John tunes, expect to hear from the likes of Outkast, Sia, Beyoncé, Fun, Adele, and Lorde, to name but a few (there are more than 70 songs in the show). To curate Moulin Rouge!’s dizzying playlist, Timbers, Logan, and music director/genius Justin Levine holed up in a Times Square hotel room with a digital keyboard, dredged up their musical memories, and took note of what worked. Their taste is impeccable, whether using a song for its sheer exuberance, as with a rousing version of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” or to reveal a character’s inner desires, as Satine does with Katy Perry’s “Firework.”

Logan has been blown away to see how powerfully audiences have connected with the show—and the songs. “I went to a wedding recently, and when the dancing started, I heard half our score being played, which was wild,” he says. “And when you see audience members respond to the songs—‘They’re using thatsong? Oh, my God! No way!’—you can feel how excited they are. It’s an experience I’ve never had before. It’s magic.”