THEATER
They’re All Misbehavin’
Nightclubs, Vegas place characters in difficult straits
BY CHRISTOPHER BYRNE
One quickly runs out of
superlatives in trying to
describe “Moulin Rouge,”
the new Broadway spectacle
that has overwhelmed the Al
Hirschfeld Theatre and is likely to
be there for a very long time. The
theater has been transformed into
a stylized version of the famous
nightclub, and the audience is
transported to fi n de siècle Paris
for a tale of passion, innocence,
and tragic love straight out of “La
Bohème” or “La Traviata,” complete
with the ominous foreshadowing
coughs. It’s all done to a score that
brilliantly knits together nearly 70
chart-topping pop songs, redefi ning
and raising to stratospheric
heights the bar for so-called “jukebox
musical.”
As Oscar Wilde said, “nothing
succeeds like excess,” and this
show is all excess. From Derek
McLane’s blazing red sets to Catherine
Zuber’s inspired period costumes
that combine historical accuracy
with a genius for cut, color,
and design, not to mention a lot of
erotic apparel on the performers at
the club. Justin Townsend’s lighting
and, most importantly for a
show of this nature, Peter Hylenski’s
precise sound design make
this the most dazzling, eye-popping
extravaganza to hit Broadway
in a long time.
Yet, just at the point one is nearly
overstimulated with a surfeit of
color and action, the piece shifts
into intimacy and a nearly monochromatic
design. It doesn’t just
give the eye a rest before the next
burst of extravagance, it provides
texture and depth for the story.
That’s also largely due to Alex
Timbers’ exquisite direction that
hasn’t missed a detail or left a
moment unfi lled. As with “Beetlejuice,”
“Rocky,” and “Here Lies
Love,” Timbers is a master at creating
a world and inexorably drawing
in the audience.
Perhaps, though, what makes
this show such a consistent pleasure
is that for all of its excesses,
it doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Karen Olivo and Aaron Tveit in the Broadway adaptation of “Moulin Rouge,” directed by Alex TImbers,
at the Hirschfeld Theatre.
In other jukebox musicals, songs
seem to be shoehorned into the
show, but, here, John Logan’s deceptively
simple book seamlessly
integrates them, effectively winking
at the audience. So, when Katy
Perry, “Lady Marmalade,” and even
the title song from “The Sound of
Music” pop in, we’re all in on the
joke.
The entire company is a marvel,
both in singing and in performing
Sonya Tayeh’s athletic, sensual
choreography. In the principal
roles, Karen Olivo as Satine, the
nightclub’s headliner, plays the
full range of a role that is chockfull
of melodrama — from virtually
selling herself to the evil Duke
of Monroth to save the theater to
her show-must-go-on dedication to
have her young lover Christian’s
music heard even as consumption
is killing her.
Yet Olivo’s performance is
grounded in an emotional truth
that makes it all work.
Tam Mutu as the Duke is the
quintessential bad guy, an irresistible
mix of sex and danger.
Danny Burstein, as Harold Zidler,
the manager of the club, deftly balances
MATTHEW MURPHY
the character’s exuberant
and audacious on-stage persona
with a softer more human side.
Sahr Ngaujah as Toulouse-Lautrec
and Ricky Rojas as Santiago are
strong, and each has his moments
as they create the show-withinthe
show that will hopefully save
the club.
Aaron Tveit as Christian deftly
plays the doe-eyed innocent, newly
awakened to consuming passion.
His voice has matured beautifully,
and he has never sounded better,
with fl awless technique no matter
what the style of the song. He is, in
a word, electric.
In the end, “Moulin Rouge” is all
about that electricity. It is unabashedly
crowd-pleasing, luscious, and
lusty, and if you ever had fantasies
of dabbling in the demimonde that
crowd is waiting for you on West
45th Street.
I’ve long been a fan of Rita
Rudner’s mordant, observational
comedy. She has a knack for
seeing the absurd in the quotidian,
and her barbs are always delivered
with a kind of weaponized sweetness.
She knows how to make us
laugh at ourselves. That talent has
been directed into the new musical
“Two’s a Crowd,” now at 59E59.
Like Rudner, who wrote the book
with Martin Bergman, the show is
charming, funny, and pointed.
The “meet-cute” premise is that
Wendy and Tom, two emotionally
adrift middle-aged people, are double
booked in a Vegas hotel and decide,
grudgingly, to make the best
of it. They start as combatants,
and, as these plots typically go,
the rollaway bed, well, rolls away.
That it’s reminiscent of comedies of
the 1960s and ‘70s actually works
in its favor, and there’s a kind of
innocent naughtiness throughout,
punctuated by Rudner’s jokes.
Wendy who is escaping an unfaithful
husband starts out angry. Yet
she softens as she learns about
how Tom lost his wife and is participating
in poker tournaments.
It’s all done with such good humor
and lots of comic bits from director
Bergman, that the familiarity
breeds delight.
The music and lyrics by Jason
Freddy, who leads the band and
delivers some of the songs as commentary,
are stylistically diverse
— traditional show tunes, rock,
country — and fi t in well with the
tenor of the show. Ruder as Wendy
and Robert Yacko as Tom are wellmatched
and fun to watch, and
they’re ably abetted by Kelly Holden
Bashar and Brian Lohmann in
a variety of smaller roles. “Two’s A
Crowd” has no pretensions of seriousness,
but it has a lot of heart. It
is the very defi nition of light summer
fun.
MOULIN ROUGE! THE MUSICAL |
Al Hirschfeld Theatre, 302 W. 45th
St. | Tue.-Wed., Sun. at 7 p.m.; Thu.-
Sat. at 8 p.m.; Thu., Sat. at 2 p.m.
| $99-$399 at ticketmaster.com or
800-745-3000 | Two hrs., 35 mins,
with intermission
TWO’S A CROWD | 59E59 Theaters,
59 E. 59th St. | Through Aug.
25: Tue.-Sat. at 7 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. at
2 p.m. | $55-$70 at 59e59.org or
646-892-7999 | One hr., 25 mins,
with no intermission
August 15 - August 28, 2 34 019 | GayCityNews.com
/ticketmaster.com
/59e59.org
/GayCityNews.com
