Image credit: Public Domain Pictures
Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) is one of my all-time favourite films. It is therefore no small thing when I say that the theatrical adaptation is even better. The show premiered on Broadway in 2019, won ten Tony Awards (including Best Musical), and arrived in the West End earlier this year. Both Hollywood and Broadway tell the story of Christian, a starry-eyed writer who travels to Paris at the turn of the century and falls in love with a courtesan named Satine, the headliner of the notorious Moulin Rouge night club. Christian and Satine’s romance is jeopardised when Harold Zidler, the owner of the Moulin Rouge, forms a dangerous business deal with a malevolent duke who lusts after Satine. With the duke sponsoring a show at the club which Christian is writing and Satine is starring in, tensions are on the rise, leading up to a fateful premier night.
The film Moulin Rouge! is a jukebox musical, including songs such as “The Sound of Music,” “Lady Marmalade,” and “Your Song.” It stars Ewan McGregor as Christian and Nicole Kidman as Satine, it has achieved both critical and commercial success, including a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards. I can only describe this film as a circus tent of music, debauchery, and romance, which sucks the audience into a rabbit hole of wonderful mayhem. The story is also saturated in ideas about personal freedom: Christian befriends a group of artists who celebrate “freedom, beauty, truth, and love” while Satine longs to escape being valued only for her physical beauty. The following quote is from the leadup to the finale when Satine passionately tells Harold that she and Christian intend to make their escape: “We’re going away from you, away from the duke, away from the Moulin Rouge!”
Fast forward to more than twenty years after the film’s release: in January of 2022, I attended a performance of Moulin Rouge! at the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End, starring Liisi LaFontaine as Satine, Clive Carter as Harold Zidler, Simon Bailey as the Duke, and Jamie Bogyo making his professional debut as Christian (a new cast will debut on 17 October). The show was a five-star experience, filled with the familiar intoxicating chaos, brilliant actors, glitzy costumes and sets, and electrifying music. Yet the show presented a new take on the story: Baz Luhrmann and his partner Catherine “CM” Martin were involved as guides in reinventing the film for the stage, and they understood the necessity of a different storyline for a modern audience.
The show focuses less on the doomed romance and more on the community made up of the dancers and artists at the Moulin Rouge. In contrast to Nicole Kidman’s declaration that she will escape Paris, stage-Satine tells the duke she will not become his mistress because “the Moulin Rouge is [her] home.” The overall tone and structure of the story also underwent changes: the show opens and closes with large, raucous numbers involving the whole cast, while the melancholy tune “Nature Boy” features once in the second act (instead of at the beginning and end, as it did in the film). The effect was that the show felt less like a eulogy to a lost love and more like a liberation, encouraging the audience to sing and dance along.
Additionally, the show includes much more diversity than the film. Satine is cast as a woman of colour (played by Karen Olivo from the Chicago cast of Hamilton in the original Broadway production), and the ensemble features characters of several ethnicities and gender identities. The themes of personal agency and freedom are more complex as the supporting characters, rather than being background pieces with no real fears or desires of their own, express their worries that the Moulin Rouge will close because of the discrimination they face in the outside world based on their race, class, sexuality, or gender. Other changes included the elimination of the highly prejudiced oriental fantasy which, in the film, served as the plot of the play Christian writes as well as the introduction of tutus in the final number for the Moulin Rouge’s male patrons (because the best part of the kick lines are the dancers’ flashy skirts, and why should only those playing female characters get to enjoy that?).
Broadway also added many new songs, the majority of which have only been released in the twenty years since the film’s debut. At first, I mourned the loss of the old soundtrack. The film takes place in 1900 yet was released in the early 2000s, and I found it particularly elegant that all the songs came from the 100-year period between the two dates. This soundtrack represents the next century of social change that the characters are looking forward to. However, as the future they are envisioning continues to take shape into the 21st century, some more recent songs were appropriate. Additionally, some of these newer songs capture the tone of Moulin Rouge! magnificently—the mashup of “Bad Romance” and “Toxic,” with powerful electric guitar, deafening drums, and flashing lights was truly a force of nature.
There are many reasons why I would say that the Broadway show is better than the film: a cast with more diversity, a story that avoids making Christian and Satine the only likeable characters, and several musical numbers that the film is now noticeably devoid of, even though it was a still a huge success at the box office without them. However, the main difference between the two renditions is the contrasting angles with which they come at the story. Which do you prefer? The sorrowful Romeo and Juliet tale or the showmanship that makes you want to scream with exhilaration? It is up to the individual viewer to choose their favourite, but personally, I think a live performance best captures the atmosphere of the Moulin Rouge itself.