Review: Moulin Rouge at the Liverpool Empire ****

Time flies and it’s somehow now a quarter of a century since Ewan McGregor’s Christian met Nicole Kidman’s Satine at the Moulin Rouge.

It seems though that truth, beauty, freedom and love don’t have a shelf life, certainly if the reported ticket sales for Moulin Rouge! The Musical, the Empire’s glitzy summer blockbuster offering, are anything to go by.

The stage musical, which started its life over the pond eight years ago where it gathered armfuls of awards, takes Baz Luhrmann’s fantastical tale – essentially vaudeville meets La bohème with a poptastic jukebox soundtrack – and augments it to elephantine proportions.

Visually its simply spectacular, Derek McLane’s sumptuous, multi-layered heart-shaped set filling the Empire stage and flanked by a rotating Mouin Rouge windmill in the box stage right and a giant blue elephant head in stereo stage left.

It forms a suitably opulent setting which is echoed through Catherine Zuber’s detailed and striking costumes where Belle Époque rubs shoulders with modern pop princess-style scanty outfits.

Scene changes, from the cacophonous cabaret hall to Satine’s elephant eyrie to Montmartre streetscapes, are slickly done, and the whole is perfectly and often rosily set off by Justin Townsend's brilliant lighting design.

In fin de siècle Paris, idealistic but impoverished young Midwestern (song)writer Christian (Nate Landskroner) arrives in shabby Montmartre where he falls in with Toulouse-Lautrec (Kurt Kansley) and Rodrigo Negrini’s Santiago the Argentinian who are hoping to persuade Satine to perform their new show at the famed Moulin Rouge.

Over at the club meanwhile, impresario Harold Zidler (Cameron Blakely) is hoping to entice ‘the Duke’ (James Bryers, a sinister, moustache-twirling baddie without the moustache) to invest in the venue to save it from closure, with the doomed Satine - Verity Thompson - as his main enticement.

Will love conquer all, or is it money that talks?

Above: Satine (Verity Thompson) and Christian (Nate Landskroner). Photo by Johan Persson. Top: Moulin Rouge! The Musical. Photo by Matt Crockett.

Right at the heart of it are Thompson and Landskroner who both give winning individual performances and also generate some chemistry as the star-crossed lovers, although I'd like to sense more simmering passion behind the glances.

Thompson delivers her big numbers with satisfying dazzle and a powerful singing voice, and while she’s a more physically robust Satine than Kidman’s ethereal screen version (she'd never get through all those strenuous dance routines if not), she does also channel some of the unwilling courtesan’s inner vulnerability.

Landskroner meanwhile is an enjoyably puppyish semi-narrator and also brings punchy vocals to the party.

Elsewhere Blakely commands attention in seemingly effortless fashion as the Moulin Rouge’s wily MC, and Kansley and Negrini have a lot of fun as the absinthe-fuelled bohemian artist double act. Meanwhile the large ensemble generates enough energy to power Montmartre itself in some complex and exhilarating choreographed routines.

Above: Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (Kurt Kansley) extols the virtues of 'the green fairy' absinthe. Photo by Johan Persson.

One of the standout features of Luhrmann’s film original was its audaciously anachronistic jukebox soundtrack, often delivered with a sly and knowing nod (where else can you find The Sound of Music, David Bowie, Offenbach and T-Rex all together in one place outside panto?).

Here it’s just a starting point for an avalanche of extra tunes, many of them mashed together in several frenetic, high-energy, crowd-pleasing medleys - driven by a great live band, the musical engine room of the evening - which populate the first half in particular.

Can you have too much of a good thing? I think you probably can, especially if it doesn’t really progress the plot.

The sheer number of songs, or snatches of songs, is partly what augments the running time to a rather bloated and arguably overblown 2hrs 45mins. The show could shed 15 minutes without losing any of the story, which also feels like it gets rather bogged down after the interval.

Many of the film originals are still the standouts: Your Song is utterly charming, Christian and Satine’s love duet Come What May is tenderly done and you can never go wrong with a bit of Lady Marmalade. For me though, the exquisite Nature Boy, which comes in the darker second half over which tragedy looms, lacks the full emotional impact it deserves.

But as a sheer theatrical spectacle, this world tour production of Moulin Rouge! certainly delivers, and it sets the bar pretty high for the rest of the 2026 season at Lime Street.