"Moulin Rouge"

[+ WilliamM]

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THEATER REVIEW 10:00 P.M. Vulture

Theater Review: Moulin Rouge! Is Broadway’s Biggest Karaoke Night

By Sara Holdren

From Moulin Rouge!, at the Al Hirschfeld.

 

The list of theater superstitions is a long one: Don’t say “Good luck” before a show. For goodness’ sake, don’t say “Macbeth” inside a theater. Never bring a peacock feather on stage. When you’re backstage, don’t whistle. Mirrors on stage are bad luck. So are three lit candles and the color blue.

 

Maybe having an elephant in the room needs to be added to the list. In Moulin Rouge!—the latest Global Creatures megamusical to drop its payload of Hollywood-inspired excess all over Broadway—a bulky if mini model of the movie’s memorable pachyderm is crammed into one of the Al Hirschfeld’s balconies. And the big blue (!) beastie seems to have brought along a buddy, more metaphorical but no less obtrusive: For all its splashy, glittery, high-kicking, butt-cheek-baring, sword-swallowing maximalism, Moulin Rouge! is something more unsettling than not good. It’s not even very interesting. There’s a shapelessness about it, a weird enervation underneath the flash and bang. It’s directed by Alex Timbers, but it feels like it was assembled by committee, even by algorithm. The show veers broadly away from its beloved-by-millennials-everywhere source material, which in itself is no crime. But the path its creators have taken is one long trip through the Kingdom of Pandering, with multiple pit stops in the Meadows of Cutesiness and the Forest of Flat Characters. Everywhere it should be filthy, it’s scrubbed aggressively clean, yet somehow it’s still a hot mess.

 

Perhaps this might have tipped us off. When my colleague Jackson McHenry spoke to Timbers and to the film’s director and co-writer, the Australian auteur Baz Luhrmann, Timbers revealed that “the show has something like 78 licensed songs.” Apparently, he “holed up in a hotel room” with music supervisor Justine Levine—who also orchestrated and arranged the show’s pop-stravaganza of a soundtrack—and “went through every story moment” to figure out what new, trendy hook they could attach to it. Luhrmann’s La Bohème–meets–Bollywood film of the fin de siècle love affair between a tubercular courtesan and a wide-eyed young writer was always a mash-up musical, with its stars belting out singles by Elton John and Bowie and Sting. But now it’s become little more than a jukebox. As a Broadway show, its top priority isn’t character, narrative, or even nostalgic appeal for the movie’s adoring fans: Instead, it commits single-mindedly to stuffing in as many additional hit tracks as possible. You will hear Beyoncé, Sia, Rihanna, Adele, Gnarls Barkley, Lorde, fun., Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Talking Heads, the Eurythmics, Regina Spektor, and the goddamn Postal Service. Whether you’ll really enjoy any of it is an open question. Moulin Rouge! is a singularly unsatisfying smörgåsbord, all amuses-bouche and no real main courses. Watching it feels like channel surfing or browsing Facebook at 3 A.M. — lots of tiny little dopamine surges with no real payoff. And as Parisian prostitutes should be well aware, it doesn’t take long for the tease to get tiring.

 

 

 

Timbers, Levine, and the musical’s producers might think this kind of musical excess is right on brand, that they’ve triumphantly out-Luhrmanned Luhrmann. But they’ve taken the kitschiest aspect of the film and driven into it full force, in the process obscuring the characters and eccentricities that made Moulin Rouge!, if brazenly over-the-top, brazenly appealing too. Don’t hold your breath for the Tango de “Roxanne,” or for “Spectacular Spectacular,” or even for “Elephant Love Medley.” They’re there, but they’re buried in an avalanche of flimsy filler. Timbers doesn’t even seem excited about them. His approach to most of the movie’s big numbers is perfunctory, as if he’s going through the motions with them so that he can get around to what he really wants to do: Stage a big showstopper to “Bad Romance” or put a bunch of dramatic moving lights on Aaron Tveit (who plays the young writer, Christian) while he belts out “Rolling in the Deep.” It’s two and a half hours of karaoke on a multi-million dollar budget.

 

And its actors seem uncomfortably trapped by it. Take Sahr Ngaujah, who’s doing his damndest to bring some vitality and integrity to the ringleader of the Bohemians, the artist Toulouse-Lautrec; or the Broadway veteran Danny Burstein, who’s trying to put his dependable charisma to work as the unctious but endearing entrepreneur, Harold Zidler — both men give the impression that they’re struggling against the material, rather than working with it, to create a character. John Logan’s big-lick-and-easy-joke-filled book doesn’t give them much to build on, and every time they get close to landing a moment, Timbers swipes it out from under them by having them launch into yet another pop song. The same little titter of recognition happens in the audience every time—“Omg that one too? Lolz!”—but the actors still have to muscle through the song itself, which often feel generic, connected to emotional state rather than action. Why have Satine (Karen Olivo) belt Katy Perry’s “Firework” instead of singing Randy Crawford’s pensive hit “”One Day I’ll Fly Away”? Why give Burstein Sia’s “Chandelier” and strip him of the wacky, role-playing weirdness of the movie’s take on “Like a Virgin”? The answer is obvious—bigger, newer, louder, flashier!—but the results are flattening. “One Day I’ll Fly Away” actually taught us something about Satine in Luhrmann’s film: She dreams of escaping her life at the Moulin Rouge to become “a real actress.” And “Like A Virgin,” for all its grotesque silliness, gave Zidler a task: Distract the evil Duke who wants to devour Satine — divert him from sex with her for as long as possible.

 

Olivo and Burstein get no such solid, if heightened, objectives to work with. Instead, they get states of being: Tragic but resolute (“Firework”) and numb with debauchery (“Chandelier”). And meanwhile, the evil Duke (Tam Mutu) gets exactly what he wants. In Timbers’s Moulin Rouge!, Satine doesn’t maneuver her way out of sex with him; she simply becomes his mistress because (we are reminded frequently) that’s what she has to do to survive. Such a tweak might seem natural enough, but it desperately deflates the story’s stakes. The Duke isn’t waiting for anything; he’s already got what he came for. Timbers and Logan have reinvisioned the Duke, in the person of Mutu, as confident, powerful, and straight-up sexy — hardly different in age and type from Tveit’s Christian (he just … has a beard and wears a lot of black). But part of the effectiveness of the original character was his freaky, mustache-twitching awkwardness, the cringey, sweaty, ill-concealed lust and the sense that something feral was about to leap out of Richard Roxburgh’s pants. Again, the musical has slicked over the potential for gross, gritty, real feeling amidst the artifice. It never finds a way to give us the sensation that Luhrmann’s camera does, when it zooms straight into the faces of his actors, distorting them into grotesques and letting us see their pores, their veins, their teeth. It is, on the whole, startlingly devoid of actual passion. There’s more emotion—and more nasty, wacky fun being had—in this GIF than in the entire show.

 

All this baggy pseudo-cleverness on the part of its creators makes Moulin Rouge! into that most gut-wrenching of spectacles: the Broadway blow-out that’s all dressed up with nowhere to go. The show is practically ripping at the seams with eye-popping design and with onstage talent, particularly among its ensemble of dancers, who tear through Sonya Tayeh’s non-stop, multi-genre, appropriately extravagant choreography like a bunch of bedazzled gazelles on leg day. The muscular Robyn Hurder is physically riveting as Nini, Satine’s bitchy but loyal understudy who gets to throw down with Santiago (Ricky Rojas) in the show’s climactic tango of jealousy, and all her Moulin Rouge soul sisters (including Jeigh Madjus as Baby Doll and, on the night I saw the show, Bahiyah Hibah standing in for Jacqueline B. Arnold as La Chocolat) join her in kicking up a storm.

 

But in service of what? At the center of the show, Tveit and Olivo, for all their individual talent, don’t spark much real chemistry, and each one seems a little stranded. Tveit’s Christian, who’s now a cornfed Ohio boy, has no rough edges, and Olivo is given too many old tropes to play to make anything specific out of Satine. Tellingly, the musical makes a half-hearted attempt to reposition her as the hero—“This is a story about a woman named Satine,” Christian tells us—but we still end up with four men on stage, mourning her and talking about how she showed them “all that truly matters in life.” That’s fine, that’s the story — spare me the surface-level 2019 rebranding.

[edjames]

Other the other hand, William, stunning and glowing reviews from the NYPost and NYTimes. While it was 108 degrees in Paris yesterday, the Al Hirsfield theater sizzled on opening night. NYTimes said "pulses with thrills," "euphoric," "plump, sleek," etc.

Broadway die-hards will boo-hoo and say this is not classic theater, but I bet this show rakes in millions and will be a sell-out for years to come. I have a ticket for Aug 22 and cannot wait to join in the experience.

 

Review: ‘Moulin Rouge! The Musical’ Offers a Party, and a Playlist, for the Ages

By Ben Brantley

 

Forbidden pleasures abound in this spectacular musical, starring a dazzling Karen Olivo as a doomed Parisian chanteuse.

 

This one’s for the hedonists.

All you party people should know that the Al Hirschfeld Theater has been refurbished as an opulent pleasure palace, wherein decadence comes without hangovers. That’s where the euphoric “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” opened on Thursday night in a shower of fireworks, confetti and glittering fragments of what feels like every pop hit ever written.

Inspired

and directed with wicked savvy by Alex Timbers, this “Moulin Rouge” is a cloud-surfing, natural high of a production. It has side effects, for sure, including the vertigo that comes from having your remembrance of songs past tickled silly and the temporary blockage of any allergies to jukebox musicals.

But for its plump, sleek two-and-a-half hours of stage time, “Moulin Rouge” — which stars a knockout Karen Olivo, with Aaron Tveit and Danny Burstein doing their best Broadway work to date — has the febrile energy you may associate with the wilder parties of your youth, when gaudy nights seemed to stretch into infinity.

Or rather, it’s like the memory of all those parties merged into one streamlined fantasy. The team behind “Moulin Rouge” — which includes the brilliant arranger and orchestrator Justin Levine and the choreographer Sonya Tayeh — know that familiar music opens the floodgates of recollection like few other stimuli.

Though it is set in fin de siècle Paris, “Moulin Rouge” uses as both its score and its lingua franca roughly 70 songs, most of them chart-toppers of the past several decades. And since the majority of them concern the extreme joys and sorrows of being in love (or lust), they are likely to have figured in the soundtrack of your own romantic history. These are numbers that many of us fell in love to, made love to and fell out of love to, and they’ve kept playing in our heads ever since.

Mr. Luhrmann had the inspired notion that such music is to our age what the arias of grand opera were to an earlier time. The movie “Moulin Rouge” pumped a verismo-style, gaslight-era plot — a hybrid of “La Traviata” and “La Bohème” — full of melodic anachronisms like “Your Song,” “Lady Marmalade” and even the title number from “The Sound of Music.”

The stage version retains most of these but has added a whole lot more, many used only in snippets. (The characters here sometimes communicate in mash-up numbers through a giddy chain of “name-that-tune” lyrics.)

At the same time, Mr. Timbers’s production, which features a strategically clichéd book by John Logan, translates the shimmery illusions of cinema into the grit and greasepaint of live theater. It picks up on the outmoded idea of show people as close kin to panderers and prostitutes, emphasizing the transactional relationship between live entertainers and their audiences.

Thus when you enter the Hirschfeld you will immediately encounter variations on the idea of love for sale. Derek McLane’s dazzling nightclub set of the title — that’s the same Moulin Rouge associated with Toulouse-Lautrec, and yes, he’s a character here — is a gasp-inspiring nest of valentine hearts, cushioned nooks and outsize exotica, illumined in shades of pink and red by the lighting designer Justin Townsend.

Lissome men and women, wearing little more than corsets and stockings, stare down the audience. (A top-form Catherine Zuber has dressed the cast sumptuously, in clothes designed to ravish.) Men in top hats and tails, cigars clamped between their lips, assess the human flesh on offer. And a splendidly seedy master of ceremonies greets us with flattering insults.

That’s Harold Zidler, played with rouged cheeks, suspicious eyes and an all-embracing leer by a marvelous Mr. Burstein. “Welcome, you gorgeous collection of reprobates and rascals, artistes and arrivistes, soubrettes and sodomites,” he says. “No matter your sin, you are welcome here.”

In contrast, there’s our other host, who says he’s summoning a cherished chapter of his life for our delectation. That’s the open-faced, virginal Christian (Mr. Tveit), newly arrived in Paris from Lima, Ohio, who asks us to “think back” and “try to remember your first real love affair.”

The object of Christian’s adoration is Satine, a nightclub chanteuse and demimondaine, almost past her prime and riddled with consumption. On-screen, Nicole Kidman portrayed her as a gossamer-spun apparition. Ms. Olivo, in a performance that sends her into the constellation of great musical actresses, gives us a figure of palpable flesh, who deploys a coquette’s arsenal of wiles and illusions to conceal illness, desperation and a hard-lived past.

When Ms. Olivo’s Satine, which has acquired even greater depth and polish since I saw this show in Boston a year ago, sings“Diamonds Are Forever,” “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” “Material Girl” and “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” — all in one number — she’s a delicious compound of artifice and ardor. Like the show itself, she skillfully walks a tightrope between archness and sincerity, sophistication and gee-whiz wonder, without ever stumbling.

The wide-eyed Mr. Tveit covers the “gee-whiz” part of the equation with appealing exuberance and a gleaming voice. He has been given two lively sidekicks — the Argentine tango dancer Santiago (the vibrant Ricky Rojas) and the painter and, uh, show-within-the-show director Toulouse-Lautrec (a charmingly melancholy Sahr Ngaujah).

As Christian’s romantic rival, the Duke of Monroth, Tam Mutu swaggers suavely and menacingly. He introduces himself to Satine by singing (wouldn’t you know) “Sympathy for the Devil.”

The stuff of radio-wallpaper has been repurposed here, but it’s never performed as karaoke throwaways. When Ms. Olivo sings the Katy Perry chart-topper “Firework” or Mr. Tveit does Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” it’s with an uncompromising, personal passion.

Ms. Tayeh’s choreography — expertly performed by a delightful and delighted polymorphous ensemble — is a perpetual motion machine of often bruising sensuality. Standard period fare like the cancan (bien sûr) and La Danse Apache is reinterpreted with electric wit.

Mr. Rojas and a snarling Robyn Hurder lead the sensational Act II showstopper, an angry blend of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” and Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” (Ms. Hurder is also part of the fab quartet of divas — along with Jacqueline B. Arnold, Holly James and Jeigh Madjus — who give torrid life to “Lady Marmalade.”)

When Mr. Burstein makes his jubilant entrance at the top of the show, you may find yourself thinking of another insinuating M.C., from another European nightclub, from another Broadway musical. I mean, of course,

But there’s an all-important difference. When the M.C. in “Cabaret” (famously embodied by Joel Grey and, later, Alan Cumming) promises that “in here, life is beautiful,” he’s lying. Set in Weimar Berlin, “Cabaret” is ultimately a cautionary musical, finding the social heedlessness in divine decadence.

In “Moulin Rouge,” life is beautiful, in a way reality never is. All is permitted, and forgiven, in the name of love. Bohemian poverty is exquisitely picturesque. Stardom is around the corner for the gifted and hungry. And even songs you thought you never wanted to hear again pulse with irresistible new sex appeal.

What this emporium of impure temptations is really selling is pure escapism. You may not believe in it all by the next morning. But I swear you’ll feel nothing like regret.

[edjames]

NYPost:

 

‘Moulin Rouge!’ review: NYC’s hottest nightclub is on Broadway

 

2 hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission. At the Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45th St.,

 

Who needs ecstasy when we’ve got “Moulin Rouge!”?

That’s the effect of the fabulous new musical that opened Thursday night on Broadway: raucous sensory overload. From its sexy sword swallowers to the newly pumped-up pop songbook and from-the-loins dancing, the show’s as subtle as Liberace’s toy poodle: a glitter bomb on Broadway.

The high begins the instant you walk into the theater, which set designer Derek McLane turned into the sort of uber-cool, members-only nightclub that keeps rejecting my application. Bathed in red light, four sultry, crystal-bedecked performers start singing “Lady Marmalade,” which cancan kicks off the story of a penniless American writer in Paris and his dangerous fling with a cabaret star.

Just don’t show up looking for a Madame Tussauds’ wax replica of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 film. Songs such as “El Tango de Roxanne,” “Come What May,” “Your Song” and “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” are still here, but they’re joined by about 70 party crashers: Walk the Moon’s “Shut Up and Dance” and Sia’s “Chandelier” among them.

Those energetic new numbers boldly propel the show into the present, and bring giggles every time one is cleverly introduced. The evil Duke of Monroth (Tam Mutu) introduces himself by crooning “Sympathy for the Devil,” and there’s a pulse-pounding group dance to “Bad Romance” by Lady Gaga. And, by God, it works! The finest show of its kind since “Mamma Mia!,” “Moulin Rouge!” is a reminder that jukebox musicals aren’t required to be soulless behemoth tourist traps. They can be — gasp! — creative.

 

That said, the story is about a tourist who feels trapped: It’s 1899, and Christian (Aaron Tveit), a songwriter, ditches Lima, Ohio, for Paris, only to find love at the Moulin Rouge, a decadent nightclub that caters to men’s wildest fantasies. The hopeless romantic is there to persuade Satine (Karen Olivo) to perform his new show, but, in a farcical mix-up, she mistakes him for the powerful Duke of Monroth. Still, the two fall madly in love, because falling in love with Tveit ain’t hard.

 

But love is a battlefield, and Christian is at war with the Duke, a sadistic snob who agrees to subsidize the struggling nightclub if owner Harold Zidler (Danny Burstein) forks over his “Sparkling Diamond,” Satine. She, in turn, must decide between duty and cutie.

Director Alex Timbers’ smartest move is not trying to replicate Luhrmann’s quick-cut sense of humor, which would crash and burn onstage. Instead, he focuses on grandiose emotions, sensuality and the storybook sensation of first love, for which Tveit’s puppy-dog innocence is ideal.

A lyric like “Tonight . . . we are young. So, let’s set the world on fire, we will burn brighter than the sun!” isn’t exactly “Send in the Clowns.” But Tveit sings it with such earnestness that it comes off as meaningful poetry. He’s well matched with Olivo’s regal Satine, who’s more practical and empowered than Nicole Kidman’s incarnation. That Mutu’s Duke is not only filthy rich but hot makes the fight for Satine’s heart much more compelling.

Just what Broadway needed: A “Rouge” awakening.

[+ WilliamM]

@edjames, you have been posting the Times review for along time . It was my fault a while ago when we disagreed about several Broadway shows. I apologise.

[memphisdad]

@edjames, you have been posting the Times review for along time . It was my fault a while ago when we disagreed about several Broadway shows. I apologise.

 

 

Have you seen it? I have. It is visually excellent but very much s karaoke night.

[+ WilliamM]

Have you seen it? I have. It is visually excellent but very much s karaoke night.

.

Yes, I am looking forward to seeing it but, not as much as other recent musicals like Dear Evan Hansen.

[bostonman]

Have you seen it? I have. It is visually excellent but very much s karaoke night.

 

Well, it IS visually excellent. And I'll admit the show has its shortcomings (the plot is way thin, the show is, IMO, a bit overlong to really sustain that plot, and the "megamix" ending overstayed its welcome) - but I can't reduce it to being a "karaoke night." I thought it was much more worthy than that.

 

One caveat I have made, though, is that seeing it in Boston last summer, part of the built-in occasion was the reopening of the Colonial Theatre, which has a long and important history in Boston, and that was in danger of being shuttered and used for other purposes. So, part of the joy of seeing Moulin Rouge there was the joy of the newly renovated, newly reopened landmark theatre. Perhaps I might not have been quite so into the show if it had just been any other tryout/touring production? I can't really say. But I know I came out of the performance in a great mood - and as a theatre professional, I can be a very tough audience lol.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

They cast a thick woman who supposedly has consumption. Strike one.

 

They cast a male lead who's got the pipes, but the chemistry of mixing baking soda and water together. Strike two.

 

I was all for The Duke throughout the whole show. He was well-sung, wasn't nearly as terrible as his film counterpart and was by-far the best looking lead on the stage. He also had palpable sexual chemistry with Satine. It's tough to root against that. Strike three.

 

The dancing is fantastic and you can see every single dollar on that stage.

 

I just think this is a show that's better suited to Vegas. I say pump up the production budget another $20 million, go shamelessly over-the-top and put it into the Venetian's showroom where Phantom used to be.

 

[MEDIA=giphy]3og0IA4UgDDyU80VaM[/MEDIA]

Edited July 28, 2019 by Benjamin_Nicholas

[+ WilliamM]

They cast a thick woman who supposedly has consumption. Strike one.

 

They cast a male lead who's got the pipes, but the chemistry of mixing baking soda and water together. Strike two.

 

I was all for The Duke throughout the whole show. He was well-sung, wasn't nearly as terrible as his film counterpart and was by-far the best looking lead on the stage. He also had palpable sexual chemistry with Satine. It's tough to root against that. Strike three.

 

The dancing is fantastic and you can see every single dollar on that stage.

 

I just think this is a show that's better suited to Vegas. I say pump up the production budget another $20 million, go shamelessly over-the-top and put it into the Venetian's showroom where Phantom used to be.

 

[MEDIA=giphy]3og0IA4UgDDyU80VaM[/MEDIA]

 

What happened to Aaron after Next to Normal. He was not good in Catch Me If You Can either.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

What happened to Aaron after Next to Normal. He was not good in Catch Me If You Can either.

 

Tveit played angsty teen very well. He had the floppy hair, the cute face and a reliable tenor wail.

 

Playing 'grown men' kind of roles has never been his strong suit.

[edjames]

What do you get when you mix La Boheme, Rent, So You Think You Can Dance, American idol, with Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus?

MOULIN ROUGE!!!

An extensive free for all of every pop hit in the past 30 years alll set in a nightclub that is more like a Bell époque Parisian bordello!

I won't even begin to let you know all my thoughts. Cast was good, choreography, good, costumes and sets yet it all left me cold.

And, yes, divest your stock portfolio because this is not a cheap ticket! Yet the orchestra was completed full, AND the Notorious RBG was there to see it last night with 6 huge gorillas looking like the extras from Men In Black accompanying her down the aisle.

[bostonman]

What do you get when you mix La Boheme, Rent, So You Think You Can Dance, American idol, with Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus?

MOULIN ROUGE!!!

 

And of course anyone who has also seen Luhrmann's Boheme will recognize the use, again, of a lighted "l'Amour" sign in Moulin Rouge.

 

Still, I really did enjoy the show. I do understand your opinion, though, and I think I can see why it would leave some people cold despite the cast/choreo/design. Frankly, that's The Lion King for me - beautiful, with stunning stagecraft, but ultimately a snooze fest. Chacun a son gout...

[edjames]

Since seeing the show, I have discussed it with 4 of my friends who have seen it and are avid theater goers. They all agree that they, too, were disappointed. The group of young gals behind me at the show did not like Karen Olivio and one pointed out, she really didn't look like someone who was dying of consumption. Oh well, to each his/her own.....

[bostonman]

The group of young gals behind me at the show did not like Karen Olivio and one pointed out, she really didn't look like someone who was dying of consumption. Oh well, to each his/her own.....

 

Clearly they never saw Montserrat Caballe as Mimi, lol.

[Clintbr]

Open your eyes and your minds and go enjoy one of the most spectacular, stunning and entertaining shows in years. Just let yourself relax for a couple of hours...marvel at the beautiful staging and sets, enjoy the sexy costumes, fall in love with the dancers! and choreography (arrive early to see the pre show dancers preform...hot!), listen as the magic unfolds to reveal 70 songs woven into the story. The principle actors are perfect and superb and bring life to the show. The excellent supporting cast all have their own special performances. The emcee role will become theatre history! The best chorus and dancing that I have seen in a long time...did I mention sexy! and HOT!! The encore, WOW!

Run, don’t walk, see a terrific show that will remind you of the great possibilities of live theatre!

[bostonman]

The emcee role will become theatre history!

 

I don't mean to burst your hyperbolic bubble, and Burstein is quite good as Zidler - but no, this is not his theatre history moment. This isn't Joel Grey in Cabaret. The show will be most remembered for its design, choreo, and the 2 leads - not for the MC.

 

Speaking of the 2 leads, I do wonder who might take over for Tveit and Olivo, should it run long enough for replacements - which I feel is a possibility.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

I don't mean to burst your hyperbolic bubble, and Burstein is quite good as Zidler - but no, this is not his theatre history moment. This isn't Joel Grey in Cabaret. The show will be most remembered for its design, choreo, and the 2 leads - not for the MC.

 

Speaking of the 2 leads, I do wonder who might take over for Tveit and Olivo, should it run long enough for replacements - which I feel is a possibility.

 

Agree. This is pure Vegas, but not great musical theater.

 

The spectacle is impressive, but My Fair Lady, Company or Hamilton this ain't.

[edjames]

Agree. This is pure Vegas, but not great musical theater.

 

The spectacle is impressive, but My Fair Lady, Company or Hamilton this ain't.

 

Absolute right!

If they hadn't screwed up the production company for Cirque du Soliel, this would have been right up their alley!

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Absolute right!

If they hadn't screwed up the production company for Cirque du Soliel, this would have been right up their alley!

 

CDS will never be the same now that Guy has nothing to do with it. He was the insane genius behind the curtain.

[Cooper]

I had heard that Moulin Rouge was a “big production” and it is. Saw it last night during NY’s “bomb cyclone” storm. But, the show must go on.

 

I loved it! It’s got all the glitz you’d expect from a big Broadway production. Really enjoyed the way they told the story by using popular & familiar songs. My foot was tapping most of the night.

 

It has a large & very likable diverse cast. The scenery, lots of bright reds & crystal chandeliers, sets the atmosphere for a wild night. Even has an elephant hanging over by the side balcony.

 

Excellent choreography, stunning costumes, great orchestra, and everyone seems to have an amazing voice.

 

It’s one of those shows that you park your problems at the door, sit back & enjoy this wonderful production.

 

Stick around for the finale. That can-can number is a real hoot.