Review: Moulin Rouge! Musikaali

“Moulin Rouge” – soulful interpretation and sparkling playing

In the musical “Moulin Rouge”, the young American composer Christian (Martti Manninen) arrives in Paris to find himself in Montmartre, a city of poets, artists, musicians, whores and thieves. There he meets a courtesan named Satine (Jennie Storbacka) who performs in a nightclub, and that’s it.

“Moulin Rouge” immediately makes the viewer squat and the epochs confused, and makes you ask what decade we are in – or what century? Maybe none, maybe all. And suddenly it feels natural to dig LaBelle’s “Lady Marmalade”, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” and Sia’s “Chandelier” in an 1890s villainous Parisian nightclub, where dancing girls are playing cancan with their petticoats and panties flashing.

“Moulin Rouge” is a Nordic co-production of a globally successful megamusical. The Scandinavian team, led by Swedish director Anders Albien, is responsible for set design, costume design and choreographies in Helsinki, among other things. In many respects, it is therefore a turnkey delivery. Palle Palmén The unpretentious lighting design made for Helsinki, like the set design, is well supported by imaginative background projections.

HKT’s “Moulin Rouge” has impressively captured the seductive world of the late 19th century Paris suburbs, which exudes lustful sensuality and forbidden passions, but is at the same time dark and merciless.

The musical depicts a wonderful and vibrant time, which was nevertheless full of contrasts. One disease or another was fatal, and the poor could not afford morality. In those days, it was good enough for wealthier people to sneak in the evenings in the tourist spirit to taste the dilapidated bohemian life in the “Moulin Rouge” of Pigalle’s red lights.

Helsinki’s “Moulin Rouge” also seduces with its music. It’s pure fireworks of band playing, singing and choirs. It is a so-called jukebox musical in its genre, which relies on existing hits. There are very few originals, although “Vannon sen” (“Come What May”), one of the top hits of Manninen’s second act, is one of them.
Manninen’s voice sounds in a wide range from the robustness of a baritone to the heights of a tenor, and Storbacka continues from there with an effortless sound upwards to the spheres of an opera soprano. The power ballad “Pala paperii” (Katy Perry’s “Firework”), interpreted by Storbacka in the first act, was still ringing in my ears during the intermission.

The songs in the Finnish version of the musical are divided into two. If the intention is to joke, the original language is played in English, and when the story is to be conveyed, the story is relied on Paavo Leppäkoski’s concise translations. For example, Adele’s music has hardly been heard in Finnish before this.

Musically, “Moulin Rouge” is a bit like Western pop music fast-forward through Edith Piaf and Nat King Cole to Bond themes. Then comes David Bowie, Phil Collins, Queen, Eurythmics, Elvis and Madonna. One of the musical themes running through the work is the Finnish version of Elton John’s breakthrough hit “Your Song”.

Fortunately, well-known world hits have been boldly arranged to serve the needs of the stage work, and very creative threads have been woven into the instrumentation and arrangements. For example, Police’s “Roxanne” as a tango!

The deck is sometimes carefully mixed up when parts of the songs are redrawn, and there is no point in trying to count how many songs have been crammed into the trickiest potpourri. Much of the musical humour of the performance is created by the strings, which borrow beat-length references throughout the history of pop.

Such a shredded tree is unlikely to be pulled without precise notes and a stick on the map. And what a captain he was! In the performance I saw, it happened to be the conductor in charge of the work, Eeva Kontu, who whipped the boys and girls out of the pit as much as possible.
The ten-piece orchestra consists of the best session musicians in the country, consisting of a four-piece core band in this musical, two guitarists, two wind players and two string players.

The playing was sickly solid and groovy, and when they rocked, they didn’t skimp on distortion. And in HKT, both the vocals and the playing are almost one hundred percent live, which differs significantly from the Swedish version, for example, which is almost backing tape stuff.

At its wildest, the City Theatre’s large stage is filled with more than 30 singing actors and dancers, who sweat as they roar around the stage, putting their hats on and off. You can’t do that without mixing automation.

Despite the virtual additional hands provided by the automation situational memory, piloting the whole thing will certainly require extreme vigilance both behind the DigiCo theatre counter supervised by sound designer Kai Poutanen and at the behind-the-scenes monitor and microphone exchange point.

At stage level, the duo responsible for the most prominent comic roles in the performance – Risto Kaskilahti, who plays Harold Zidler, and Antti Lang, who plays Lautrec, could be a great counterforce to the love couple in “Moulin Rouge”.
And of course, the whole HKT team was still in full swing at the premiere, just over four months after the premiere! And what is it like to be able to load to full stands night after night.

The spring of the “Moulin Rouge” seems to be pretty much fully booked, so I have to get more of this kind of delicacy in the autumn season.

And that’s what they say.

Estimate Riffi.fi.