Moulin Rouge! The Musical

Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film “Moulin Rouge” is an alchemical delight – romantic and craven, tawdry and glamorous. “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” isn’t quite as potent, nor does it have that edge of seediness that makes Luhrmann’s film so intriguing, instead investing in a level of opulence designed to overstimulate.

Designer Derek McLane covers the Bristol Hippodrome walls in crushed red velvet, a working windmill spins in the royal box, and a main character makes her entrance on a rhinestone-encrusted swing that is lowered from the rafters. It is ostentatious, absurd, and completely ravishing to look at.

The plot itself is paper-thin, a melodrama encrusted in sequins: famed performer and courtesan Satine falls in love with penniless composer Christian, but is forced by the Moulin Rouge’s commander in chief, Harold Zidler, to pander to a rich but evil duke, who is the club’s only hope of survival.

Subtlety is hardly the name of the game: Satine’s consumption is rapidly signposted via the theatrical device of Chekhov’s Ominous Tummy Ache. Really, Moulin Rouge! tends to be at its most enjoyable when it eschews such concepts as “characterisation” and “narrative” and throws itself entirely into its jukebox musical credentials, with a bevy of mash-up pop numbers that teeter on the edge of sonic blasphemy.

Justin Levine is the mad scientist behind these newly Frankensteined arrangements, and while there is something viscerally alarming about hearing Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” segue into Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” with all the delicacy of a steam train ramming into a building, somehow, possibly by the sheer force of will of a remarkable ensemble, one manages to emerge from the crash site dazed and grinning.

‘Moulin Rouge!’ is now bulked into a veritable behemoth of millennial pop bangers. There are the ones that were in the film. There are some that were around when the film was made but weren’t included (‘Torn’; no kidding, the theme from ‘Dawson’s Creek’). Then there are more recent numbers that might have been included if they’d been written at the time (‘Hey Ya’, ‘Firework’, ‘Bad Romance’, ‘Rolling in the Deep’, the riff from ‘Seven Nation Army’). And finally there are a few cool oldies, notably a late ’60s Stones medley and a run-through for Timbers’s old collaborator David Byrne’s ‘Burning Down the House’.

It is, by design, far too much. There must be at least 50 songs in the mix here: it’s less a jukebox musical than a frantically-pressing-shuffle musical.

Choreographer Sonya Tayeh throws everything at the wall within the first 10 minutes, incorporating the burlesque of “Lady Marmalade” into a boisterous can-can, and the best, most audacious number, “Backstage Romance”, remixes Lady Gaga and Britney Spears into a tango, before exploding into a raucous company number.

For the most part, director Alex Timbers wisely keeps the pace up, leaving little breathing room between each delirious group number and the next, but Moulin Rouge! does sag in its quieter moments, with John Logan’s book too thinly drawn to evoke any pathos for this doomed relationship.

Cameron Blakely – flamboyant and bold as scene-stealing cabaret impresario Harold Zidler – personifies the innocuous pleasure of a bohemian and feverish production. Effortlessly juggling the slapstick and stern dispositions of Zidler, the Les Misérables star risks upstaging Thompson’s love-struck Satine.

Verity Thompson dazzles and stirs as love-struck Satine, stuck between true love Christian – portrayed by the talented Nate Landskroner – or a rich patron who can save the production.

The film had the ravishing hyperreal twinkle of Lurhmann’s lens, and a deft mastery of its own melodrama that falls rather flat in John Logan’s book for the musical – the big emotions are going through the motions.

"Moulin Rouge! " is determinedly set on entertaining its audience; and if that intention can lend itself to a blandness in its slower moments, and a smoothness around some of its edges, then there’s almost always a diamond of a number around the corner.