Moulin Rouge! review: Ostentatious, absurd and ravishing

For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. The plot itself is paper-thin, a melodrama encrusted in sequins: famed performer and courtesan Satine falls in love with penniless composer Christian, but is forced by the Moulin Rouge’s commander in chief, Harold Zidler, to pander to a rich but evil duke, who is the club’s only hope of survival. Justin Levine is the mad scientist behind these newly Frankensteined arrangements, and while there is something viscerally alarming about hearing Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” segue into Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” with all the delicacy of a steam train ramming into a building, somehow, possibly by the sheer force of will of a remarkable ensemble, one manages to emerge from the crash site dazed and grinning. Choreographer Sonya Tayeh throws everything at the wall within the first 10 minutes, incorporating the burlesque of “Lady Marmalade” into a boisterous can-can, and the best, most audacious number, “Backstage Romance”, remixes Lady Gaga and Britney Spears into a tango, before exploding into a raucous company number. And for all that Clive Carter’s oleaginous Zidler makes reference to the “reprobates and rascals, soubrettes and sodomites” that populate his club, there is little salaciousness or moral complexity attempted in this adaptation, in comparison with the sordid edges of Luhrmann’s film.