Piccadilly Theatre | ★★✩✩✩

How can something so celebrated and anticipated be so wrong?
In its first moments this eye-popping, award-laden Broadway adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie stuns the senses. Designer Derek McFarlane turns the interior of the Piccadilly Theatre into the Moulin Rouge with huge fantastical constructions. The club’s windmill emblem is on side of the auditorium and a giant blue elephant on the other.
Yet the real elephant in the room is that this show generates all the emotional and narrative grip of a pop video. True, this undoubtedly no-expense-spared production spectacularly recreates the febrile hedonism of Paris’s best known venue at the beginning of the last century. The stage is festooned with colour and the sets through which well-drilled dancers segue through numbers without pausing for breath are among the most extravagant I have seen.
But because the score is really a tsunami of often heavily-edited chart hits (there are 74 credited in the programme) the main impression here is the kind of parody of period and place seen on light entertainment TV on a Saturday night. So liberally are the cliches scattered it is a wonder that director Alex Timbers does not have an accordion-playing busker sauntering through the romantic streets of Montmartre.
In his defence, the objective here is to recreate the Parisian tropes celebrated by Luhrmann’s movie. But whereas the film starring Ewen McGregor and Nicole Kidman invents its own aesthetic — a kind of surreal and ironic knowingness —this show takes itself seriously when it eventually tells its paper thin story which has been adapted by screen and stage writer John Logan.
The narrative has a whiff of La Boheme to it. The big attraction at the cash-strapped Moulin Rouge is its star Satine (the excellent Liisi LaFontaine) who, like Mimi in Puccini’s opera, is dying of consumption. Her mission is to seduce the Duke of Monroth (Simon Bailey) into pumping his money into the venue. But she mistakes struggling songwriter Christian (Jamie Bogyo in his professional debut) for the Duke. Christian has teamed up with none other than Toulouse-Lautrec (Jason Pennycooke) and tango dancer Santiago (Elia Lo Tauro) in the hope of putting on a new show at the club.
The plot is squeezed into the cracks between tracks, most of which are belted out by big voices and accompanied by basque and fishnet-wearing dancers, or frilly colourful dresses when the famous can-can routines are revived.
It’s sexy but whereas on screen musicalising a story with massive pop hits from the likes of Elton John (Your Song),The Police (Roxanne), Adele and Katy Perry among others felt genuinely inventive, on stage it feels more like a juke box musical on steroids.
On more than one occasion the show goes medley mad. And as usually happens when music is parachuted into a show the songs often make little narrative sense. It all washes over you like the sounds from someone else’s radio. And as this spectacular juggernaut makes its dazzling yet increasingly uninteresting progress it seems to box-tick every song you ever heard.
The result is the antithesis of what a musical should be, the sublime melding of story and music. Here numbers land with with the care of bullets from a machine gun. And once the unavoidable question occurs, “why is everybody singing?”, it never goes away.