Moulin Rouge: The Musical
Bushnell Center for Performing Arts
Hartford
Nov. 25, 2023
Beautiful people parading around half-dressed. A score of certified hits. Eye-popping sets and world class performers. What could possibly go wrong?
As it turns out, high-quality is not the same as well done.
So I concluded when I saw Moulin Rouge at the Bushnell, which tells the story of Christian (Christian Douglas), a songwriter from America, and Satine (Gabrielle McClinton), a cabaret actress in Paris at the eponymous bar/brothel who fall in love. The Moulin Rouge is in desperate financial straits until Satine catches the eye of a duke (Andrew Brewer) who will front the money for a new show featuring Christian’s music and Satine as the star, saving the Rouge- as long as Satine will be his and only his.
I’m an unapologetic romantic, so I was looking forward to the story of love, lust and betrayal. The staging and production were immaculate, with the stage of the Bushnell transformed seamlessly from a neon cabaret to the dark alleys of Paris to a magical evening beneath the Eiffel Tower. McClinton and Douglas are gifted performers. Even from my seats in the mezzanine I could see the expressiveness of their faces. McClinton in particular dazzles. She managed to play Satine as a confident, sexy starlet who was also carrying the weight of the cabaret on her back. I truly believed that she was stuck making an impossible choice between her heart and the livelihood of everyone around her.
The problem was that I didn’t get enough of that Satine during the production. She, and the rest of the talented cast, were smothered by the music. At a whopping 2 hours and 40 minutes, I was expecting either a breakneck plot of subterfuge, shady characters and double dealings; or a deep dive into the lives of Satine and Christian that explained what landed them in the Rouge.
Instead, we got a lot of music. And I mean a lot of music.
Moulin Rouge is a “jukebox musical,” which means that instead of performing original songs, the cast sings modern songs repurposed for the musical. The production placed the songs into a series of medleys, where the performers sang just enough of the song for the audience to recognize it before moving on to the next in the medley.
When Christian meets songwriters Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Santiago in Paris (Nick Rashad Burroughs and Danny Burgos respectively), they hit him with a rapidfire staccato of modern classics that they’d “written.” I laughed and clapped as I recognized song after song. I thought this was going to be their personal gimmick: 19th century artists who wrote “Don’t Stop Believing” 70 years before Journey.
But then every musical number was a mashup of contemporary songs. Yes it was clever, as the medleys matched the emotion and mood of the scene. But it was too clever. I felt that each musical scene was a flex of musical knowledge instead of an opportunity to get to know the characters better. None of the words belonged to Satine or Christian. They belonged to people completely outside the context of the story, so while that little hit of nostalgia was pleasurable, the songs revealed nothing about the characters singing them.
That issue was compounded by the fact that each musical number was simply too long. The medleys began to drag after a while, and I often found myself counting the number of songs in each instead of actually listening to them. The overlong musical elements had the double effect of swallowing many of the opportunities for characters to talk to each other. Yes, this is a musical, but I felt there needed to be a better balance between the singing and the acting. At times the performance took on more of the characteristics of a concert than a play.
I love musicals, but you really can have too much of a good thing. Moulin Rouge needed to take a step back from its own musical splendor to let the actors and the story breathe. It’s a shame that it didn’t, because like Harold Zidler demanded of Satine, the performers absolutely shined- when they were allowed to.
NEXT
Moulin Rouge continues at the Bushnell through Dec. 3.
Jamil goes to Hail the Sun at the Webster Theater.
