Moulin Rouge

Last night, I got to see Moulin Rouge on Broadway, thanks to the show's online lottery. It was certainly a night to remember.

I saw understudy Dylan Paul as Christian, but the show's star Satine--Karen Olivio--was there, and Danny Burstein was playing his regular role as the master of ceremonies, Harold Zidler.

Since I loved the 2001 movie so much, I had my reservations about the stage show, but the script by John Logan does an admirable job of keeping the moments we all loved from the film, but always with a twist from the original.

When you walk into the auditorium, you find that the theatre has truly been transformed. The audience gets the feeling that they really are at the Moulin Rouge, not the actual nightclub that opened in Paris in 1889, inspired posters by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, and later became a home of successful operettas, but the Moulin Rouge of the movie, the wild fever dream of film director Baz Luhrmann.

Though Alex Timbers directed the stage musical, Luhrmann is credited as a creative consultant. The collaboration appears to have worked well, since the show's aesthetic feels unified. From the moment you enter the theatre, performers are already walking around, smoking, flirting with each other, and generally enthralling the audience. "No photography until intermission," the ushers tell you, which allows everyone to savor the moment. (Unfortunately, it also means that intermission becomes selfie hell, but that probably couldn't be avoided.)

The opening number does a great job of evoking not just the setting but the various types of people who frequented the Moulin Rouge. The most interesting denizen of the club is Toulouse-Lautrec, played wonderfully by Sahr Ngaujah. I had seen him before in various Athol Fugard plays at the Signature Theatre, but missed his Tony-nominated performance in Fela! on Broadway. He's an amazing actor, and he inhabits the the character of Toulouse-Lautrec--again, not necessarily as he was, but how we might dream him to be.

When the film came out, it was a shock to hear pop songs performed in a period piece set a hundred years in the past. The stage musical could only meet the challenge of the original by incorporating some new pop songs, many of which weren't even written when the movie premiered, but have so infected our culture that we cease to even think about what their lyrics are saying. By resetting these songs in a completely alien environment, we hear them in a new way, and the show is able to use them to tell its story, even though they were never intended for that purpose.

Moulin Rouge is a jukebox musical, but it uses its songs so cleverly, we don't feel we need new music. The old songs feel new, whether they're a recent hit by Beyoncé or a classic tune by the Rolling Stones. (Speaking of which, Tam Mutu does a mean Stones cover as the villainous Duke of Monroth, who is far more evil than he ever was in the movie.)

So if like me, you had reservations about seeing the musical on Broadway, put them aside. Missing this show would be an elephantine mistake.

Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost is not one of those plays by Shakespeare that has always been universally acclaimed. In fact, when Lucia Elizabeth Vestris and Charles James Mathews decided to use the play to inaugurate their management of Covent Garden in 1839, it appears to have been the first time the play was performed since 1605!

The heart of the play is usually the "secondary" pair of lovers, Rosaline and Berowne. (Vestris made sure she was playing Rosaline.) That was true also of The Public Theater's musical adaptation of the play currently running at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. Maria Thaler plays Rosaline as the sassy best friend who is always more interesting than the protagonist, and Colin Donnell is appropriately cynical as Berowne, while at the same time remarkably self-aware of the limitations of his own cynicism.

This new version features the songs of Michael Friedman, who also gave us the music and lyrics for such hits as Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson and This Beautiful City. Director Alex Timbers, the man who brought Hell House to New York, provided the adapted book, which is clever, though sometimes scattered.

King Ferdinand of Navarre and the Princess of France (simply billed as "King" and "Princess" is this version) outrank everyone else in the play, though they're not quire as interesting as Berowne and Rosaline. Still, Daniel Breaker of Passing Strange fame was wonderfully engaging as the king, and the former Lysistrata Jones star Patti Murin turned the princess into a memorable party girl with a bit of a mean streak.

The concept for this version, that the whole thing takes place at the five-year reunion of a bunch of college friends, worked surprisingly well. Each of the four couples had a backstory, and their falling in love seemed more like a rekindling of old flames than a whirlwind romance. It turned the play's central motif into that tricky gray area in between being young and carefree and having to grow up, something reinforced by the play's dark ending that (spoiler alert) shows love's labour's lost.

Don Armado often comes close to stealing the show, and this was very much the case with Caesar Samayoa, who makes his entrance in this production while wearing a red speedo. Described in Shakespeare's first folio as "a fantastical Spaniard," Armado in this production flaunted both his latin roots and his sexuality in a way that made him the envy of the play's over-educated males. This was by far the most sympathetic portrayal of Don Armado I've ever seen.

Love's Labour's Lost is only playing until Sunday, so if you haven't seen it, you better get there early to get in line for tickets!