Review: “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” a rousing and cathartic singalong, perfectly pitched for now

Dressed in tailored cabaret, can-can and fetish outfits, ensemble cast members of “Moulin Rouge! The Musical” prowled the stage suggestively before the June 10 performance, the house lights and normal-volume chatter no match for their hungry gazes.

For a touring Broadway show that had only opened the night before, it was a suitably come-hither tease before the curtain rose at the Buell Theatre. Or, rather, before the fire-red, heart-shaped sets began reshuffling themselves. Innovative and color-splashed, the nearly three-hour production that followed — itself an adaptation of the sensual, candy-flavored 2001 movie — rose above a formulaic plot to find its cathartic sweet spot.

Fans of director Baz Lurhmann’s pop culture-sampling movie on which this Tony-winning touring show is based knew the curves ahead of time. Rapt from the first pop-medley, we clapped, swooned and giggled with the sequined spectacle, its uniformly gorgeous cast also impressively diverse in age, shape, skin tone and gender.

The turn-of-the-19th-century story follows star dancer Satine (Courtney Reed) at the infamous Moulin Rouge, a club tucked into the Montmartre Quarter of Paris. She’s the indisputable diamond of this risqué, financially crumbling cabaret, which attracts all types, high and low, from the cobbled streets outside.

One of them is Christian (Conor Ryan), a penniless, striking lad from Lima, Ohio, who’s just arrived in Paris and befriended a pair of earnest Bohemians — the grizzled Toulouse-Lautrec (André Ward) and muscled tango dancer and gigolo Santiago (Gabe Martínez). Together they decamp to Moulin Rouge for some steamy nightlife as they formulate their own musical, with Christian playing the burgeoning composer.

When Christian beholds Satine, he’s floored by her improbable sparkle and poise — which, as the film’s followers know, is a skilled ruse. In her neon-accented, elephant-shaped dressing room (like the movie, it’s all unabashedly anachronistic and flirty), Christian appeals to her and eventually wins her heart, even as the cartoonishly evil Duke of Monroth looms over his future after buying up the club. That includes, as he crudely states, Satine and everyone else who depends on the Moulin Rouge to survive.

Christian and his streetwise buddies work a thinly veiled version of it into their own musical plot, and perhaps because of its blinding obviousness (the Duke’s not the fastest horse on the track), the story-within-a-story effectively echoes and gathers anxieties. “Moulin Rouge!” could not often be described as subtle, but the pathos here feels earned.

Father figure and ostensible ringmaster Harold Zidler, played irascibly on this night by the canyon-voiced Kent Overshown, steers and punctuates scenes as various dancers and club staff council and fret their way through rehearsals for this musical, “Bohemian Rhapsody” (haha/groan).

The cast, particularly the leads, worked as a single unit amid fantastically complex choreography and blocking. For audience members such as my young son, it was pure magic: Bohemian musings on alternately posh and shoddy Parisian rooftops; razzle-dazzle spectaculars and confetti; true love and tragedy. As befits a tale set in a class-striated late-19th and early-20th-century Paris, it was part carnival and part commentary, a starter course on musical sophistication whose contours riveted my son as “Hamilton” or “Singin’ in the Rain” have me.

Just as important as truth, beauty and liberty was the production’s song-licensing budget, which I can’t even begin to grasp. Spanning 50 or so years, it was a head-spinning montage of top-charting English-language titles — often three or four instantly recognizable within the same number — fashioned into new numbers with occasionally new material. Each fit the mood, though they alternated between facile (Lorde’s “Royals,” The Police’s “Roxanne”) and canny (Reed’s belted, triumphant take on Sia’s “Chandelier”).