It is a story as old as time itself. Boy meets girl, girl meets boy. They let love weave its web softly around them as they spin their dreams and bare their souls within that web. Then reality seeps in as they are forced to face the inevitable — that their love cannot be. Stories of star-crossed love never end — from the stormy tale of Cathy and her Heathcliff, to Guinevere whose desire for Lancelot paves the way to Camelot’s ruin, Qays ibn al-Mulawwah who is driven to madness by his love for Layla and Orpheus, whose journey into the underworld to retrieve his wife, Eurydice, proves to be futile.
But Moulin Rouge isn’t just a story of star-crossed love; it is a brilliant spectacle that slits open and displays the seamy underbelly of Paris, in all its decadent, vibrant glory. To recreate that spectacle is no easy task and Michael Muthu, director of A Dark Tale from the Moulin Rouge — a stage adaptation of the movie Moulin Rouge by Baz Lurhmann and Craig Pearce — knows it. He tried his best; there was earnestness and honesty in the production, the sets, costumes, music and casting was decent, the execution was adequate. But technology, always a capricious beast, played up a fair bit during the staging, affecting the finesse of the overall production.
The script stuck fairly close to the original. The play began with David Bowie’s version of ‘Nature Boy’. Then the male lead, the writer, Christian (Gokul Anand) took over. He revealed that the woman he loved was dead and recounted the story of their meeting and their love, taking us deep into the bowels of the Moulin Rouge. Christian, who had left home to be part of the Bohemian movement that was sweeping through Paris, encountered a group of performers and offered to write a play for them that they could hope to sell to Harold Zidler (Sarvesh Sridhar), owner of the Moulin Rouge. Here, he met Satine (C. Aishvarrya Suresh), the beautiful star courtesan of the enterprise, and fell in love with her. However, she was promised to Duke of Monroth (Yohan Chacko), a potential investor. Aishvarrya Suresh’s voice was beautiful; unfortunately, it was constantly drowned by the music. Yohan’s performance wasn’t too bad, though he could have avoided the accent. It slipped a couple of times. Sarvesh and Gokul managed to pull off their roles well. However, there was a visible lack of energy on stage — evident among the cancan dancers, in particular. And while chaos in the Moulin Rouge is allowed, the mayhem on stage was, at times dreadfully so. Also, the lights went haywire mid-performance — they fell on the crew who were shifting sets, while the performers were on stage.
Moulin Rouge is an ambitious project and to be fair, the performers did give their all to it. However, there is that inevitable comparison with the movie and it didn’t quite manage to suspend the disbelief it was supposed to. It was a good spectacle but not a spectacular one.
