Moulin Rouge! on stage: ‘it burns prettily enough, but it doesn’t blaze’

Tony-winning adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s much-loved film now on at the Piccadilly Theatre

Moulin Rouge on stage
A ravishing, ‘hedonistic spectacle’

As the curtain seems finally to be rising again “on a more carefree” world, we have just the show to get the party started in the West End, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. Moulin Rouge! – a Tony-winning adaptation of Baz Luhrmann’s much-loved film – is a bit “short on plot”, but it more than makes up for that with “hedonistic spectacle”.

As in the film, the slender story concerns a “doomed, albeit finally requited love told in forlorn flashback by a wide-eyed bohemian with a preternatural gift for song-writing” – all of which is really just an excuse to fill “a dreamlike fin de siècle Montmartre with an array of modern pop hits”.

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