Moulin Rouge!

When the 2023-2024 Broadway touring season was announced, and I saw Moulin Rouge was the season closer I was excited. I like Baz Luhrman movies but never remembered a damn thing about the 2001 movie other than the Patti LaBelle song Lady Marmalade being in it. I was looking forward to this one.

When you enter the theater you see a giant bright red sign that glows Moulin Rouge while actors walk around smoking and pacing behind the sign like caged tigers. The set is impressive. Perhaps the best I've ever seen. And then.......

The show begins with a chorus line of dancers singing Lady Marmalade and we are introduced to the emcee, Harold Zidler (Robert Petkoff) giving us the rundown on the Paris nightclub. We see Christian (Christian Douglas) arrive in Paris from Ohio, meet the two bohemians, Toulouse-Lautrec and Santiago who are writing a musical and helping them with lyrics. Then we see Satine (Gabrielle McClinton), the star of the Moulin Rouge, promised to the Duke of Monroth (Andrew Brewer) but wacky confusion arrives as Satine thinks the Ohio rube, Christian, is the Duke. They fall in love within 5 minutes, the Duke takes over the club and possesses Satine, love falters, Satine coughs, which of course means she's dying, and she dies breaking Christian's heart. 

I didn't care about any of the characters. Everything was so rushed. There are what seemed like a million different pop and rock songs sung for less than 10 seconds before moving onto another song for 10 seconds and on and on and on. It drove me batty. It was so utterly frustrating to hear the opening notes of a song only for it to be cut short with yet another song. It's like a goddamned night watching Name That Tune. The entire first act was like this including a weird ass version of Katy Perry's Firecracker. It annoyed the hell out of me. I wanted to leave. Act 1 was a freakin mess.

The came Act 2 opening with an entire song. Lady Gaga's Bad Romance was the highlight of the show at that point. After that came more songs with longer snippets that were tolerable and even enjoyable. Act 2 was definitely better than that mish mosh of a first act.

Is it a jukebox musical? Not really, it's more like a crazy person hitting shuffle every 10 seconds on Spotify. Somebody does that in a car and you gently throw them out at the next rest stop. They do it on a stage and people go nuts applauding. I didn't get it.

The performances are fantastic. Nick Rashad Burroughs as Toulouse was especially on target. He was impossible to take your eyes off when he was onstage. Robert Petkoff as the emcee Harold Zidler was also on top of his game. The main characters, Christian and Satine, were great singers but their "love story" was a snooze. Andrew Brewer's Duke tried to be an evil presence but I didn't particularly see it. 

Anyway, the touring Moulin Rouge is in Omaha all week. You may like it if you're into hearing recognizable songs for 10 seconds or so then moving on. It's definitely a show for the attention span challenged.