'hurry up and update!'
if i cooked dinner for you, would you thank me by saying, ‘can’t wait to get more lasagne from you!’
if i was knitting you a pair of mittens, and i showed you the first one, would you thank me by saying, ‘what’s your knitting schedule? when will you finish the other one?’
if i was sewing you a quilt, and you hadn’t seen my progress in a few months, would you ask me, ‘ummm so is that quilt abandoned? not to be rude but are you ever going to finish it?’
when people make things for free, when they work hard on something and don’t ask anything in return, that is called a GIFT. jostling their elbow to hurry them along is something you should’ve outgrown before you turned twelve. fiction on the internet is not an exception.
Okay, so let’s start speculating.
The thing about a Moulin Rouge tribute episode is that it doesn’t have to use any of the songs from the film because the film is pastiche and you can honor pastiche with its own pastiche.
That said, I’m guessing relevant/most iconic tracks from the film, that I suspect they won’t have rights problems with are:
“Come What May” (the only original song in the film)
“Your Song” (Elton John)
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana)
“The Show Must Go On” (Queen)
“Roxanne” (The Police)
The last two on that list are the ones I feel the least sure we’d see, because they’re both strange animals in terms of original context-movie context-Glee context.
The other really iconic moments from the film are “Lady Marmalade” and the Elephant Love Medley. Glee could certainly do its own Elephant love medley with totally different tracks than the film used.
I can also see them using “Chamma Chama” and tossing it to Brittany (no, I don’t even know).
The other question, AND THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT, is would a tribute episode respect Red Curtain conventions and the plot of Moulin Rouge?
If so, that means it’s an episode about a doomed love affair that the show will not reopen the narrative on after the episode.
So yeah, I’d love to see Kurt and Blaine sing “Come What May” and have a hard time envisioning anyone other than Kurt as Satine (because Rachel is many things but ethereal beauty…. no), but this is absolutely a be careful what you wish for thing.
My gut says we’ll get an episode that feels like its respecting Red Curtain structure, and then it won’t… possibly in a show within a show way like the Christmas episode this past year. But this is a tense thing.
Things Moulin Rouge is about:
Fame vs. Love (Rachel and Finn)
Death (Kurt)
Prostitution (Sam, Blaine, Santana, everyone)
Innocent Boy from the Country is Corrupted by the City (remains to be seen)
—
This also feels like the appropriate moment to laugh my head off about three Moulin Rouge trivia things that don’t matter but are bonus hilarious to me now that Glee is taking on this tribute ep.
- The scene that was never shot for “Slave to the Rhythm”
- An excised subplot in which Christian and Satine runaway together and wind up in a threesome with a Count von Groovy at his estate in the countryside (I’m not making that up).
- A persistent blind item during and after shooting of the film.
