There's a tellingly awkward moment where Christian has been brutally dismissed by Satine under threat from the Duke, and he launches into a tortured, angry take on Adele's "Rolling in the Deep." Sword-swallowers, can-can chorus lines, confetti explosions, and pyrotechnic displays populate the first frenetic minutes of “.After a finale-like “Lady Marmalade” opening montage that ecstatically captures the manic, near-constant jump-cut energy of auteur Baz Luhrmann’s acclaimed 2001 film, it is hard to know where to go and just what exactly the storytelling frame is for this lavish, big-budget stage adaption that becomes emotionally inert between dazzling musical numbers, and is ultimately an overwhelming and empty theatergoing experience.Aaron Tveit (“Next to Normal”, “Catch Me If You Can”) stars as Christian, an impoverished songwriter from Lima, Ohio seeking inspiration in the bohemian garrets of fin de siècle Paris when he falls for Satine (Karen Olivo, “West Side Story”, “In the Heights”), a consumption-sick courtesan and headlining performer at the famous Moulin Rouge.Karen Olivo and Aaron Tveit.

Here, rather than being merely a scheming rival for Satine's headliner billing, Nini is a sister who feels sufficient solidarity to warn her as danger looms. ".It's audaciously excessive, but it works. Beneath that signage at the front of the passerelle, two shapely female sword-swallowers do their thing, inhaling steel like it's a titillating sex act.The show proper hasn't even started, and already, Timbers and Co. have taken Bazmatazz to a whole new level, bowing with flamboyant theatricality to the more-is-more aesthetic of Luhrmann and his wife and design collaborator Catherine Martin, who get a "creative services" credit here. But maybe the millennial need to be part of the show and not just a passive spectator makes participation more important.Whether or not it always works in the service of the flimsy story, the constant barrage of songs is a blast. In 2002 Baz Luhrmann, the idiosyncratic Australian film and theatre director, brought his stunning 1990 Opera Australia production of Puccini's La Bohème from Sydney Opera House to Broadway, a tale of a consumptive heroine and her bohemian friends … Among those interludes are Satine psyching herself up to be the oily Duke's plaything by belting out "Firework," Toulouse-Lautrec confessing his unrequited love in "Nature Boy," or Christian establishing a secret signal with Satine in the rapturous.While the show is very much a patchwork, it's the strength of the performers that ultimately sells it, as much as the knockout visuals. Photo Credit: Matthew Murphy.In order to save the iconic nightclub and music hall owned by impresario Harold Zidler (Danny Burstein, “Fiddler on the Roof”), Satine entertains a relationship with the evil Duke of Monroth (Tam Mutu) while Christian and his pals, Toulouse-Lautrec (Sahr Ngaujah) and Santiago (Ricky Rojas), devise a new musical production for the Moulin Rouge that just so happens to mirror its backstage love triangle.While translating a story from screen to stage often gives writers greater opportunity to explore the inner world of characters through the interpolation of song and the use of other inherently theatrical devices, the opposite turns out to be true for “Moulin Rouge!”—itself already a musical in film form that finds its story diluted and denuded in this stage iteration.I did not see the film “Moulin Rouge!” in theatres in 2001, but I have seen it many times since, and the device of having characters in 1899 Paris express themselves using a mashup of contemporary pop music works better on screen than it does on stage, where a wink from the performers—often implied, but sometimes literal—transforms the introduction of each new, familiar song into a laugh line that rips away whatever storytelling power or emotional resonance any given song might otherwise possess.And there are A LOT of songs in this show—some 70, in fact, from 161 credited authors and artists as varied as Edith Piaf, Georges Bizet, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Jule Styne, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Sting, David Bowie, Dolly Parton, Bono, Britney Spears, Outkast, Lady Gaga, Jack Antonoff, Sia, and Katy Perry, all crafted into mashups that are flashy and fleeting in pace, and more anachronistically amusing than dramatically purposeful.Danny Burstein as Harold Zidler.