MUSICAL FLOUNCES BACK WITH CANCAN DO ATTITUDE
Moulin Rouge
Piccadilly Theatre London
★★★★✩
THERE are windmills, ra-ra skirts and high-rise leotards. There are reams of carnival lights and an ocean of red velvet. There is an enormous blue elephant. Finally, after being derailed by Covid before Christmas, the stage version of Baz Luhrmann’s deliriously OTT love song to pop music and the theatre opens in the West End. Resistance, frankly, is futile. Winner of ten Tonys on Broadway, Alex Timbers’ exuberant production was never going to crash and burn, yet there is something about the timing of now, as we emerge from yet another Covid-induced hibernation, that gives it extra flight. It essentially retains the film’s deliciously daft post-modern plot – penniless songwriter Christian tries to save glamorous, doomed burlesque star Satine from the evil duke in Belle Époque Paris by writing her love songs that include some of modern pop’s greatest hits – but updates the soundtrack: Adele, Katy Perry. It is knowingly silly, but demands we take it seriously.
The high-wire mashing of pantomime, opera and pop video takes a while to find its groove. There is something a bit mechanical about the raunchy dance routines that establish Montmartre’s supposedly dangerously seedy atmosphere. The first half struggles to fully calibrate song with sentiment. But after Christian woos Satine with a kinetic medley that knits classic tracks around Elton John’s Your Song, the incandescent moments keep coming. The absinthe tripping scene is set, gloriously, to Sia’s Chandelier.
Naturally it looks spectacular – an effervescent fever dream of euphoric excess. Justine Levine’s multireferencing soundtrack – 70 songs in total – keeps it moving.
The cast is top notch, too – Jamie Bogyo as a puppyish Christian, Liisi LaFontaine a formidable Satine, former Pop Idol and Big Brother star Zoe Birkett as the dancer Arabia.
Yet Moulin Rouge’s biggest weapon is the way it taps into everyone’s personal jukebox through the universal language of pop. It’s not only Christian and Satine’s love story we feel but our own, too. Did I say resistance is futile?