Moulin Rouge! The Musical on tour – review

As soon as you enter the auditorium for Moulin Rouge! The Musical, you get the strong sense that resistance is going to be futile. Even before the show begins, they go all-out for visual splendour that’s designed to smack you between the eyes, with an intense, almost aggressive, red and gold colour scheme on stage, around which prowl aloof gentlemen in top hats and contemptuous female dancers whose dresses billow around the stage. Meanwhile, the eponymous windmill slowly rotates in one balcony box, while a life-size model elephant looks down from the other.

It’s a statement of intent. Derek McLane’s sets and Catherine Zuber’s costumes bring the world of fin-de-siècle Paris to life in vibrant, psychedelic technicolour, and it provides the most lavish imaginable frame for the simple story of Christian, the bohemian artist who falls for the consumptive night club singer Satine. She’s the main attraction at the Moulin Rouge, but the club is on its last financial legs and she’s forced to enter a transactional relationship with the nasty Duke of Monroth to keep it alive.

If you thought Baz Luhrmann’s film was flashy, then this stage adaptation gives it a real run for its money in the bling stakes. However, those eye-popping visuals are both the show’s greatest strength and its weakness, because you quickly get the sense that this drama might be all surface and no substance.

The songs are the most obvious example of that. It’s mostly a jukebox musical that plunders well-known songs to provide the musical framework, but in this case, it’s mostly fragments of songs melded together to produce quirky medleys. That means that the audience’s focus is drawn to the songs themselves rather than how they support the story, and that distracts from what’s meant to be an all-consuming story of love and passion. Satine’s first appearance, for example, looks stunning as she sparkles on a trapeze, but choosing “Diamonds are Forever” as her first number rather kills the seductive mood.

Once you notice that, the other dramatic problems become more obvious. The characters are drawn in colours that are as blinding as the show’s costumes, which means that there’s barely any subtlety and the interactions are so blunt that they’re almost comical at times. Furthermore, little seems at stake. You know from an early stage that Satine isn’t going to survive until the final curtain, and when her death eventually comes, it’s a bit of a non-event. And the onward sweep of desperate passion stalls several times: lots of sequences provide an excuse for a number but don’t further the story a jot, such as the tedious sequence in act one where the bohemians explain their show to the Duke, or the elongated absinthe-induced vision in act two. Overall, I couldn’t shake the view that it’s all unnecessarily drawn out, and that the show could lose half an hour from its running time and gain from the excision.

That said, if you’re prepared to overlook all this, then what glitters on that surface really is gold. The big ensemble numbers look and sound great, especially the sequence that opens act two, and the performers give their all. Verity Thompson’s Satine is fragile but big-hearted, while Nate Landskroner’s Christian has the goofy sense of an outsider and, if dancing isn’t his forte, then he sings with passion. James Bryers brings dark sexual energy to the sinister Duke, while Cameron Blakely plays Harold Zidler, the club’s MC, with rakish energy. Put it all together and you have the shiniest piece of superficiality you could imagine, and if you’re happy to immerse yourself in it, then you’ll have a ball.