It is billed as a jukebox crowd-pleaser, but there never was a jukebox that sounded quite like Moulin Rouge. Composer Justin Levine – actually, he is credited with musical supervision, orchestration, arrangements, and additional lyrics – has applied himself to the cabaret medley overture form with the self-delighting enthusiasm of a mad scientist. To call his method of connecting diverse scraps and snatches of popular music – the hooks and the singalong melodies – a kind of bricolage doesn’t do it justice. This is the sound that an algorithmic neural network might produce, a smooth blending of the hottest bits of the hottest songs. If anything, it’s an anticipation of the future of the jukebox. You enter your theme – courtship, sex, romance, breakup – and out comes an endless pottage of contemporary classics: a mashup unlimited.

This Melbourne production is headlined by Alinta Chidzey as Satine, the consumptive nightclub fancy woman. She makes a formidable entrance, descending from the flies on a swing, darkly chauntling the opening bars of ‘Diamonds Are Forever’. Her rich and versatile voice, powerful enough to cut through the aural clutter, is a highlight of the show. When she slides off the swing, however, she is altogether less impressive. There are times when she looks more like a denizen of Madame Tussauds than Montmartre. Then again, there never was a wax figure so robust and radiant as Chidzey. Nor a consumptive, come to think of it.

Des Flanagan offers a tolerable though rather featureless Christian. He lacks machismo, which is fine because this is a weird sort of protagonist. Christian has the same creepy combination of innocence and zealotry as Graham Greene’s quiet American. And, like his countryman, he is prey to sexual jealousy. He begins the show as a bone-headed bohemian blithering on about love and ends as a gun-wielding stalker plotting murder–suicide, still blithering on about love. God save us, as Greene says, from the innocent and the good. Christian is only ironically a Christian, and Flanagan’s instinct to make this entitled lunatic as bland as possible is probably sound.

Andrew Cook is wonderful as the nefarious Duke. His voice is mellow, easy-on-the-ears; and his comic smarts are a treat. He has plenty of fun with the Duke in his more cartoonishly diabolical moments, swaggering and preening and glowering. The Duke, however, is a character with surprising complexities. (At least, they’re surprising in the context of this depthlessly silly show.) His second-act plea to Satine – a riff on Rhiannon’s ‘Only Girl (in the World)’ – is soulful and multifaceted, and Cook pulls it off with considerable style. He’s attuned to the sympathetic devil in the Duke. And, yes, his standout moment is the potpourri of Rolling Stones hits with which he greets Satine in the first act.

Alinta Chidzey (Satine) and Des Flanagan (Christian) in Moulin Rouge! The Musical (photograph by Michelle Grace Hunder)

The musical is a crude but faithful refashioning of Luhrmann’s crude but unfaithful refashioning of La bohème. The main difference is the vastly increased number of songs sampled. Some scenes, however, flop badly and are no match for the kitschy kineticism of the movie. This includes the movie’s most famous scene: the appearance of Kylie Minogue’s green fairy. To be sure, it’s hard to imagine how this bit of filmic dazzle might best be translated for the stage; but the workaround proposed here, with Chidzey tottering around in a pair of coat-hanger-and-stocking novelty wings while the rest of the cast wheeze along all huggermugger to Sia’s ‘Chandelier’, is inadequate to say the least.

Other scenes, though, are at least as good, if not better than the movie. The work of New York-based choreographer Sonya Tayeh is strong throughout. And the sinister ensemble piece – ‘El Tango de Rozanne’ – is perhaps the one moment in the show when everything coheres and grips and thrills. Led by the excellent Ryan Gonzalez and Samantha Dodemaide, dancers sweep across a blood red stage, the men hauling the women as if they were disposing of corpses. The sexual violence that is elsewhere repressed in this giddy fairy tale bubbles to the surface before dissipating in the show’s finale. John O’Connell’s version of this scene is rightly regarded as an iconic screen-dance moment. This is a worthy homage.

But it’s all very cheerful, right? Well, Moulin Rouge is not as much fun as I thought it would be. This is the problem when a show gets rave reviews in New York. It sets up expectations that can be difficult to meet. Sitting in the circle, separated by some distance from the stage, the sound swirling above my head, I found Moulin Rouge a rather alienating experience. On my right, the elephant stared at me with an expression of bluest misery. On my left, the moulin rouge itself, the windmill, churned round and round. This is a show that can induce at times a terrible sense of hopelessness: the feeling that we are adrift in a kind of cultural purgatory, still fitting the same meaningless words to three-and-half minute jingles as they did in the year minus one.

And the moral seems to be that this will go on forever: round and round, round and round.

Moulin Rouge! The Musical, with a book by John Logan, directed by Alex Timbers. The season continues at Regent Theatre, Melbourne. Performance attended: 26 November 2021.

This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.