The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
G-strings, feathers and ripe fromage
A documentary lifts the frilly skirts on life at Paris’s celebrated Moulin Rouge – and its ‘Yorkshire mafia’
It’s 2am and I’m leaning against the most famous windmill in the world, while the lights of Paris burn below. On the rooftop bar of the Moulin Rouge, absinthe cocktails are clinked and spilt. A few dancers, now off work for the night, laugh in a cloud of Gauloises. It’s about as French as France gets – and yet, curiously, the laughter has a distinctly Yorkshire flavour.
For a century the Moulin Rouge has been synonymous with cabaret. Now it has opened its doors for a behind-the-scenes BBC series. Viewers meet new recruits, anxious auditionees, and a veteran soloist, Jessica, who after a dozen years at the club is quitting the humdrum world of highkicks, topless dancing and sequins to chase her new dream – of becoming an estate agent in Stratford-upon-Avon.
The first episode ends with Jessica nervously knocking on a door, readying herself to break the news to the theatre’s artistic director, Janet Pharaoh. I won’t spoil her response, but having met Pharaoh, I can see why dancers might have extra reason to walk on tiptoe.
A quick-witted, no-nonsense Yorkshirewoman with a froth of curly hair which makes her look like a champagne bottle that’s been shaken too hard and popped, Pharaoh joined the club as a 19-year-old dancer, and then became its ballet mistress in 1997. She regularly holds auditions in her hometown, Leeds, which explains those accents. (Her dancers joke about a “Yorkshire mafia”.) It’s a very international cast, but with a dozen languages between them, backstage they default to English. Pharaoh has invited me for dinner and a show – an experience that’s usually €260 a head – but first comes a tour.
Founded in 1899, when Montmartre was still close to the countryside – there were actual windmills – it started as a simple dancehall without a stage. The topless routines it’s now famous for would come later. The club’s early success was thanks to the outrageous Louise Weber, known as La Goulue (“The Glutton”). She was the first great cancan star, until she retired to raise circus lions. When the Prince of Wales came to watch her dance, La Goulue stopped the band mid-song to insist that he buy a round: “Oi, Wales – champagne’s on you!”
One night she invited a short, beardy friend along – Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec,
who with his posters and paintings did more to immortalise the club than any other artist, with the possible exception of Baz Luhrmann. (Luhrmann’s 2001 film, and its stage-musical spin-off, have attracted a younger crowd.)
Every day, 1,700 people walk through its doors, passing original Toulouse-Lautrecs in the foyer, while a vast chandelier straight from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s nightmares gleams overhead (cleaning it takes four days, and a scaffolding tower). What those 1,700 punters don’t see, however, is the mad anthive of activity going on behind the foyer’s walls. With 1,000 costumes and accessories to maintain, the building is half-theatre, half-workshop.
One door opens onto a room filled with seamstresses replacing sequins (many have worked there for decades). There’s a separate room for buttons. The theatre has gobbled up its suppliers over the years. A historic local feather-dying workshop – they make a particular shade of Moulin red that no-one else is allowed to use – was brought in-house. Entering it, having descended a crooked staircase, I see the most beautiful shoe I’ve ever seen, covered in artfully spiked black feathers. I want to take a photo, but in this room photos are banned. I’m visiting just before Paris Fashion Week, and all this turkey, goose and pheasant plumage will grace top-secret designs for Vuitton, Gaultier and Valentino.
Then there are the bustling dressing-rooms – where dancers leave affectionately sweary Post-it notes on each other’s mirrors – and a cramped backstage space. “It’s very tight, when you’ve got the girls running around in these,” says Zeke, a dancer who appears in the series, waving a hand at giant red feathered headdresses – “and the boys pinned to the wall, trying to put costumes on in 30 seconds.” Growing up in rural Australia, he was the only boy in his dance class.
After his previous job in a Mickey Mouse show at Disneyland Paris, being constantly surrounded by topless women “was a bit over
whelming at first,” but Zeke professes to be more shocked by the city’s architecture. “My god, highrise buildings!” High-rise? Aren’t Paris’s buildings famously just seven storeys? “I’m from a country town. I’m used to buildings that are two storeys high.”
Female dancers are split into two squads: can-can, and topless. Everyone starts on can-can, with the option of moving to topless later. I’m told there’s no pressure to move. “Now everybody is so woke,” says Fanny, the guide leading me around the venue. “People say, ‘How can you have topless dancers in 2023?’ But they are proud to do it. It’s about choice.”
After exploring this rabbit’s warren, we sit down for the show. Due to an old superstition, every Moulin Rouge show since 1963 has a title beginning with F: Frou-Frou, Frisson, etc. Most ran for two or three years, but the current show, Féerie, has been the only thing on offer since 1999. The team have another ready to replace it (with its own F title – they refuse to tell me what it is). And yet Féerie – with its cheesy Europop score – keeps selling out, so the show must go on.
There are guest circus performers as palate-cleansers between the dances, but aside from the odd gimmick – on St Patrick’s Day, for instance, the red Windmill turns green, and there’s a can-can v Riverdance showdown – it’s the same show, twice a night, seven nights as week.
Some people in Pharaoh’s shoes might feel frustrated or bored. Imagine running St Martin’s Theatre in the
West End – forever doomed to stage nothing but The Mousetrap. And yet, as I scan her face in the show, it’s clear that she still cares. She winces and frowns at dancers’ imperceptible slip-ups, and at one point leans across the table to joke: “I always dreamed of having a little electronic thing so I could zap them if they did something wrong.”
For all the bared or beaded bosoms, it’s high-camp fromage rather than anything genuinely raunchy – and as sexless as a Boden catalogue. But there’s plenty of spectacle: one dancer dives into a giant water tank to swim with enormous snakes. “The snakes are a nightmare,” sighs Pharaoh. “When they eat, they can’t work for 10 days.” When not performing, they live with an old circus family, snake-handlers for five generations. Born in captivity, some of the serpents’ great-grandparents were Moulin stage performers.
It’s not strictly true to say nothing changes. Thanks to “animal rights”, says Pharaoh, a routine with horses was cut post-Covid. “Which is really stupid, ’cos they lived the life of Riley.” The snakes are still working, of course, but animal lovers rarely get sentimental about things that slither.
The invasion of Ukraine forced another cut. A Russian dance, which was initially tweaked into a statement of solidarity – “I changed it, put in blue and yellow,” says Pharaoh – but still went down badly, so was dropped. “Some people would shout out, and we don’t want that.” Still, the choreography was only vaguely Russian-ish to start with. “To me it’s Slavic!” she protests, with an ironic eye-roll: “Slav, Ukrainian, Russian, it’s all the same…” Much of the choreography is non-specifically foreign-ish. One Aladdin-ish routine features turbans; another transports the cast to an Indonesiaish temple, where snake-hipped natives are “discovered” by a pithhelmeted explorer. It’s a bit dated: were it launched as a new show today, there would undoubtedly be comments about cultural appropriation.
But the climactic can-can – based on 19th-century steps – is timeless. Classical dancers find it a particular challenge, as it breaks every rule in ballet. There’s ancient, satirical symbolism embedded in its high-kicks: one leg hoisted high like a gun, to mock the military; two dancers’ legs raised into a steeple, to mock the church. It’s a relic of its time, but still feels naughty – much like the Moulin Rouge itself.