Moulin Rouge! the Musical review: not sexy enough to be a spectacular spectacular
What a shame. This long-awaited, much-delayed Broadway adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s high-camp 2001 film musical has razzle-dazzle style but precious little substance. The big numbers are ravishing, but the central relationship between Liisi LaFontaine’s courtesan Satine and newcomer Jamie Bogyo’s writer Christian is consumptively thin.
Luhrmann’s signature idea of juxtaposing the bohemia of Belle Epoque Montmartre with 20th century songs is worked to death, with everything from Adele to Gnarls Barkley wedged in. And for a show about passion and decadence, full of sinewy, rump-flashing choreography, it’s remarkably unsexy.
Things begin excitingly. The Piccadilly Theatre has been transformed - rather like the Playhouse has been for Cabaret - with the legendary Parisian nightclub’s windmill and elephant sculptures flanking a bejewelled, heart-shaped tunnel, and audience members among the catwalks on the forestage.
A body-positive, gender-fluid quartet struts on in eccentric lingerie and performs a writhing, thrusting version of Lady Marmalade. This segues into an uproarious, full-cast can-can to Bowie and Talking Heads, presided over by MC Harold Zidler (Clive Carter, strangely but successfully channeling Jim Broadbent’s original performance).
But as soon as the romance starts, the pace and the temperature drop. It’s not the fault of LaFontaine and Bogyo, who have fine singing voices and throw their hearts into it. Luhrmann’s film always was a broad-brush love letter to art and doomed romance, with an iffy plot and cardboard characters. But it had cinematic panache, and the novelty of Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor mugging outrageously and duetting on Elton John’s Your Song.
Here, John Logan’s adaptation robs Satine of her acting ambitions, sanitises the film’s feverish tone, throttles back on the slapstick, and simplifies the ending. Apart from that first number, and the inclusion of a chorus-boy lover for Zidler and a few tutus for the male dancers, the show remains comfortably – even primly – heterosexual. The much-vaunted ‘feminist’ updating of the show proves half-arsed at most.
Despite her late cry of “no one owns me” Satine remains a character entirely without agency, dropping in and out of the action on her trapeze and shuttling between the beds of the cartoonishly malevolent duke (Simon Bailey) and the insipid Christian. It’s left to Jason Pennycooke’s Toulouse-Lautrec to give the show a smidgen of personality with his outrageous hon-hon-hon French accent.
Alex Timbers’ production excels when it seduces the eye, not the mind or the heart: Derek McLane’s sets and Catherine Zuber’s costumes are essays in polychromatic fabulousness. A scene of promenading, pastel-outfitted aristocrats in Rue Beaumarchais recalls the Ascot sequence from My Fair Lady, but it’s mostly swishy frock coats for the boys, colourful high-cut underwear for the girls. There are more fishnets here than in the entire British trawler industry. The waxing bill alone for this show must be huge.
Sonya Tayeh’s choreography for the group numbers is vigorous and thrilling: the one moment of true raunch and danger is the tango to The Police’s Roxanne, where Elia Lo Tauro’s macho Santiago hands Sophie Carmen-Jones’s lithe Nini off to a series of punters. And after the limp diminuendo of the ending, the curtain call recapping all the show’s highlights is a triumph.
I’m sure the name-recognition of Moulin Rouge! will draw an audience. But it seems frankly lazy to piggyback on an established and popular entertainment property, gussy up its best bits, and make its flaws somehow worse.
Piccadilly Theatre, booking to July 2; buy tickets here
