Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Borderline soft porn but thrilling: Moulin Rouge! The Musical at Piccadilly Theatre reviewed

Plus: a play at the Young Vic that makes you wish time would speed up and your life would end sooner

Supreme talent: Liisi LaFontaine as Satine in Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Credit: Johan Persson

Moulin Rouge wins no marks for its storyline. A struggling Parisian theatre is bought out by an evil financier who wants to marry the venue’s star, Satine, whose heart belongs elsewhere. The show opens like a pantomime with a bantering style and cheesy jokes. And there are passages of physical comedy that look weird amid the glamour of fin-de-siècle Paris. But the slapstick is crisply acted and well directed. And the comic scenes are balanced by full-throttle dance routines played by strutting hunks and twerking lovelies in black fishnet stockings. Every bodice is wound tight enough to ping open at any second. It’s borderline soft-porn but it’s delivered with thrilling doses of self-confidence and brio. Why can’t Olympic gymnasts do stuff like this instead of somersaulting over boxes?

With a company of 50 or more (including a ‘deputy head of wigs’), this is one of the West End’s most lavish productions. The scarlet set designs glow with the alarming radiance of a nuclear reactor during a meltdown. And there’s an eye-scrambling array of coloured costumes on display, like a theme park devoted to giant butterflies. Visual riches explode on every side. The songs, taken from the modern canon of pop, are given fresh twists, fresh energies. Composer Justin Levene has spruced up Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and turned it into a pumping hard-rock anthem. And it’s far better than the original (even though that sounds like heresy), because Adele’s voice is too sweet and chocolatey for the material, and her enunciation doesn’t do justice to her brutal, vengeful lyrics.

It’s borderline soft-porn but it’s delivered with thrilling doses of self-confidence and brio

The show’s first act is all about infatuation. The second act turns to commitment and we follow the doomed affair between Christian, a penniless American composer, and Satine who is mortally stricken with tuberculosis.

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