Just as we settled down and the lights went out in the theatre, Tanya leaned over to me and whispered ‘the wires are on fire – it’s started’. It was the date that will be forever emblazoned in infamy – the 24 February 2022. When war began as Russia invaded Ukraine. Facebook had lit up with news and comment and expressions of disbelief and sadness. Here we were, in the the Piccadilly Theatre about to watch the stage production of Moulin Rouge, the musical.
Whilst Russian tanks swarmed over the border into the Ukraine, we were confronted with the seductive stare of women dressed in stockings, suspenders and the finery of burlesque, defiantly eyeing up the clientele in their seats. We were being ogled by those we had come to ogle. It was disconcerting, but sexy. Who doesn’t like a bit of predatory female attention?
Whilst the world descended into conflict outside, we were transported into love and passion and joy and ecstasy and song and dance and sex and all the things we have missed so viscerally during the past two years of pandemic life. This was a rich entertainment. A lavish extravagance. Excitement for the libido. Titillation for the eyes. Life for the eyes, ears, blood, heart and soul. This was live theatre, live life – back in the world and at its best.
Moulin Rouge is the exuberantly told tale of an aspiring American song writer who comes to Paris in search of inspiration, to fall in love and to live the Bohemian life. He falls in with Toulouse Lautrec and an Argentine flamenco dancer who see the young American’s skill as a way into selling Lautrec’s idea for a new production into the famed Moulin Rouge theatre in Paris’s quartier Pigalle.
They set about trying to introduce the songwriter, Christian, to Satine, the star of the Moulin Rouge. In a case of mistaken identity, she thinks he is a duke and the man who she is supposed to seduce in order to save the theatre from closure and also to secure her own financial future as the mistress of an aristocrat. She falls for the lyrics Christian sings her, thinking he is the duke, and Christian falls in love with Satine. They are doomed lovers. The impresario in charge of the theatre insists that Satine plays ball with the duke and she does. Meanwhile, having a secret love affair with Christian.
The duke agrees to fund Christian and Lautrec’s production on the condition that Satine is his and his alone. She agrees and spurns Christian, even though it breaks her heart to break his. Then we discover that Satine is dying from consumption. Everything comes to a head on opening night at the Moulin rouge for the new production, the story for which mimics real life. Satine, with nothing to lose, declares her love for Christian and dies in his arms on stage.
Having left the audience in tears, the encore breathes an abundance of life back into the auditorium, emanating from the stage, with a raucous, abandoned, joie de vivre of song and energetic dance centred around the Can-can. Indoor fireworks, colour, vibrancy, sexiness, style and sheer chutzpah fizz around the clapping, dancing audience as the cast take their bows and fire exploding sticks filled with coloured foil to shower the whole place with purple, silver and scarlet and gold hearts. A shower of love to take home and end energetically with an eye-popping spectacular. It is utterly, spellbindingly, please-never-let-it-end brilliant.
We have been starved of this sort of visceral entertainment for so long. The audience, swept away by soaring songs and sumptuous stage sets, was on its feet. Standing ovations, tears, laughs, boos fro the cruel duke. This was life on stage and in the auditorium. My God how we have missed this joy. To cry in sympathy for a fictitious character in whom we are all collectively so emotionally invested; to weep at the tragedy of star crossed lovers; to feel the emotions of love and hate or cruelty and generosity, of comradeship and envy. All this, all of it, was like opening up our hearts to the sunlight. After the darness of being kept in lock down, of being kept behind closed doors, here was real humanity. Here was raw emotion, artfully laid out for us to soak up and revel in.
There is no substitute for live performance. There is no experience like flesh and blood, song and story all experienced together, collectively. It is our greatest human bond. Being there together is what life is about. Not appearing to be there, or being there virtually or being there in an atomised way. Or being there in an entirely fake metaverse made up of avatars and false identities with fantasy worlds and made up reality. (I like my made up reality to be, er, in real life.) Or on Zoom, seemingly together but each inhabiting our apartheid existences, separate and alone. Collective experiences are what make us human and experiencing something as good as this, as rumbustious as this, as life-affirming as this is what everyone needs right now. To restore us from the ravages of pandemic and to store us up for the storm to come as it rolls out westwards from the Ukraine.
If Moulin Rouge teaches us anything, it is the gospel truth that love conquers all, that love is everything. That life is tragedy but we must go out singing at the top of our voices if we possibly can-can. Amen.