Director Alex Timbers on the End of Here Lies Love and a Career of Daring to Do 'Too Many Things'

In 2006, before Broadway beckoned, Alex Timbers was the fresh-out-of-college director of the viscerally confronting haunted attraction Hell House. At that time, he took pride in the number of audience members that passed out. “We had a chalkboard to keep score,” he said in a recent phone interview with Broadway.com. “It was quite a lot.”

The material and the venues may be different but, in his own way, Timbers is still channeling that subversive spirit as one of the most adventurous theatermakers working on Broadway. His three latest projects showcase his tendency to go outside the box, as well as above and beyond, when it comes to showing an audience a good time—whether it’s the immersive disco setting of Here Lies Love, the high-octane actor-audience rapport of Gutenberg! The Musical or the elaborate, enveloping fantasia of Moulin Rouge!

Here Lies Love, the most formally boundary-pushing of these—part-musical, part-dance party—closed on November 26, after 150 regular performances. Timbers makes no bones about it: Bringing an immersive and participatory show to Broadway was a risky venture from the get-go. “Here Lies Love is, for better or worse, not trying to do one innovative thing. It’s trying to do six innovative things. It’s many different things at once, and I wonder if it's too many, ultimately.”

As Timbers explains, when the show ran off-Broadway, most audiences wanted to be “in the middle of the action.” That wasn’t the case for Broadway. “I don't know if that's a factor of it being on Broadway or if it's just that there's a really limited audience that wants that kind of immersion, but it was true that more people wanted to stare at it than be a part of it.”

“While I wish the show would run longer, I think it's an incredible achievement to get to do something so formally surprising and in a way historic on Broadway, even for a short period of time," he added. “I think about when I was 15 and I saw Tommy at the St. James. It just changed the way I thought musical theater could be. I hope that's true for some young theatermakers and Here Lies Love.”

Timbers, who cut his teeth directing sketch comedy, recently earned an Emmy nomination for directing and producing John Mulaney: Baby J, having previously directed the comic’s Kid Gorgeous, shot at Radio City Music Hall. How did he draw on a lifetime of work in the theater to direct a one-man comedy special? “You start with the same things that you'd ask about any piece: What are the themes? What are the attributes and the qualities that you're trying to foreground? Is it making it feel poignant or is it making it feel really brash? Is there a visual journey? How do you make it feel dynamic?”

And then, Timbers said, you think about your star—whether it’s Mulaney or, to cite two other Timbers-directed productions, David Byrne in American Utopia or Pee-wee Herman in The Pee-wee Herman Show. “You’re thinking about how you can create a platform for their material to be best received and embraced and to foster that connection with the audience.”

At this point, Timbers’ extensive comedy experience also informs his theater work. Working with Mulaney and Nick Kroll on Oh, Hello in 2016 inspired elements of the Broadway incarnation of Gutenberg!, which Timbers originally directed off-Broadway in 2006. (The "Too Much Tuna" segment of Oh, Hello, for example, inspired Timbers to explore the cameo guest segment of Gutenberg!)

“I was kind of thinking to myself, ‘Well, let's not limit ourselves to how we did it the first time. Let's keep that same D.I.Y. sensibility [as the off-Broadway run], but really push it to the limits. Is there a coup de théâtre in it? Are there other ways to eventize the experience?'”

As for Moulin Rouge!, four years after opening on Broadway, it feels as extravagantly, gloriously irresistible as ever, and a milestone in an audacious theatrical career. “Getting to work on that has been an extraordinary experience, and just from an aesthetic, style exploration point of view is the culmination of a lot of work. I feel really proud of it.”

And, as it turns out, when it comes to rendering audience members unconscious, Timbers has still got it. “I still read performance reports for Moulin Rouge! about people fainting during it. It still happens.” (Disclaimer: Moulin Rouge! probably does not induce fainting that much more than any other Broadway show.)

But what would the young Timbers, the enfant terrible who directed Hell House, make of the maximalist populism of Moulin Rouge? “I think young Alex, to the extent that he would've thought anything on Broadway was that cool, would've been impressed by it.”