There are few nightlife spots as legendary as the Moulin Rouge. Whether through the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, Baz Lurhmann's rollicking musical, shadowy stories of intrigue during WWII or reputation as the birthplace of the can-can, most people are aware of this Paris landmark. I suspect fewer realise that the place is still going strong nearly 130 years after its founding.
When it opened its doors in 1889, the Moulin Rouge gave Paris' rich a place to "slum it"; opulent luxury and racy entertainment in one of the city's poorest neighbourhoods. While today's Pigalle is no slum, it remains a somewhat dodgy red light district and the club's prices are still for high rollers. The show with dinner is €195; the evening's second, late performance without food is €97. Prices are marginally cheaper on weeknights. Most nights sell out. A full house is 850 seats. Though the show's costumes and sets are lavish, this production has been running since 1999, so one assumes those costs were recouped long ago. It's a family-run business, and they own the building. Contemplating the profits is an eye watering exercise.
Having sat through the show, I'm a bit surprised they're still packing in the crowds. The production is curiously old-fashioned. You'll see better quality dancing and hear stronger voices in a London West End musical. (I suspect this isn't actually down to the talent of the performers, but the fact that they've been doing the same show twice a day since they started and there's an element of "going through the motions"). But there's quirky charm that makes the experience utterly unique, as do the magnificent surroundings. And there's no cabaret in the world with this provenance. You're at the source, and the ghosts of history are thick around you.
The experience is part old-style Vegas show, part Cirque du Soleil and part theme park production. With breasts. Lots and lots of naked breasts. At times is was almost comic, as lovely costumes had panels awkwardly cut out to tick the boob requirement. When I was a child, I believe this kind of thing was big in Vegas and called a "topless review". Those shows are long gone from The Strip but thriving at the Moulin Rouge. It seemed a bizarre contradiction in these days of #metoo and gender equality, but it was hard to get offended when most of the dancing was about as sexy as a Disney Princesses parade.
I did, however, find myself a bit irritated at the lack of parity in costuming. While the troupe of 60 women was parading around showing off most of their assets, the 20 or so male dancers left almost everything to the imagination. Why didn't I get to appreciate more six packs and taught thighs instead of cheesy sequinned suits? Hey ho.
The evening starts in an enormous queue. With tables packed at high density and 850 meals to be served in just over an hour, management has seating down to an art form; it's a bit like boarding a plane. The audience enters into an enormous, characterless lobby space next to the original club. You're released in small groups to go single file through a narrow door into the original lobby, and then down a plush red concourse to be seated. There are various price levels and group bookings obviously go through various resellers; I suspect prices, proximity to the stage, menus and alcohol shift accordingly.
We booked through Viator on Trip Advisor, which was able to offer dinner show tickets when the main Moulin Rouge web site was sold out. It was only a few euro more expensive than the direct price and featured transport back to any hotel in the Paris city centre. (Tip: If your plans are flexible we saw that Viator drops the price of unsold tickets on the evening of the show in their Place de la Concorde office, from which the excursion departs. Swing by here between 5:30 and 6 and you may get a last minute deal.) Without discounts, the evening is roughly the equivalent of good seats in the stalls of a London show, plus a top-quality pre-theatre dinner, and pre-show and interval drinks at the theatre. Is it worth it?
Yes, for a one-time experience, though I wouldn't return.
You do, to be fair, get two shows for the price of one. As everyone is getting seated and having dinner there's a band on stage with two excellent singers. Ironically, rather than delivering expected classics like La Vie en Rose and La Mer, the tuxedo-clad crew is sliding out Vegas standards from the Rat Pack and Nat King Cole. It just didn't seem right to be perusing a lovely French menu as the chanteuse rolled into "well it goes from St. Louis, down through Missouri, Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty..."
I was pleasantly surprised to find a menu with options rather than the uninspiring banquet food you might expect with these numbers. We could choose between tuna tataki, beetroot chutney and beetroot salad or a rabbit terrine for our first course, hake on black rice or chicken with roast vegetables for the main and a pear charlotte or chocolate and caramel cake for dessert. The price included half a bottle of wine per person, with a choice between champagne, red or white and the ability to move between them if you have enough people at your table to be opening and sharing full bottles. The food was uniformly excellent, far better than any of the bistros we dined at over the weekend. Service is fast and efficient, and surprisingly personal despite the huge numbers.
The Las Vegas Lounge singers wrap up and a solid barrier comes down on the stage with carefully timed precision as the desserts start to hit the tables. This gives you a few minutes to properly appreciate your rather extraordinary environment. It's not quite a Baz Lurhman set, but he was clearly working from reality. The decor is fin de siecle France meets tart's boudoir: burgundy with lavish accents of gold, striped fabric draping the ceiling, little lamps with shades on all the tables keeping the overall lighting low. Wall paintings around the edge of the auditorium recall the glories of the past in styles much inspired by Toulouse-Lautrec.
Though there are some tables for two tucked away around the back edges of the auditorium, most of the seating is at long, narrow tables of eight or more radiating out from the crescent of the stage like rays from a child's drawing of the sun. Each consecutive circle of tables sits on a curved terrace above the ones below; it looked like everyone would have an excellent view. Tables went right up to the stage on the side but there was an intriguing rectangle left clear in the middle. Clearly, the show would be projecting into the audience.
The main show consists of four "scenes" interspersed with guest acts. The scenes are long musical numbers that tell a story, almost like mini-musicals with custom written scores and different "stars" called out of the line-up. Costumes are a very big deal; there's a lot of promenading to the music as you appreciate the feathers, sequins and breasts. The first, "The Moulin Rouge Yesterday and Today", and the last, "The Moulin Rouge from 1900 to ..." are remarkably similar, other than the fact that the last is the one that has the obligatory can-can number. The second, "The Pirates", is pure Disney, with princesses pining for love, dancing corsairs waving their blades and even a love duet with a turbaned prince and princess flying over the audience on wires. Very Aladdin.
Within it there was also this bizarre scene with a bunch of priestesses at a snake temple ... one of a handful of places the choreography does get quite sexy ... who are preparing a victim, with heaving naked breasts, naturally, for sacrifice. Up from the centre of the auditorium comes a water-filled glass tank roughly the size of a small suburban pool, filled with large boa constrictors happily swimming. In goes the "sacrifice" to swim for a few minutes with the snakes as the music reaches its crescendo. I hate snakes, so was torn between keeping my eyes closed until it was over and watching the double drama of the girl in the pool and the stage hands keeping her companions from escaping as they slithered over the tank's rim.
The third scene, "Au Cirque" was probably the best for pure entertainment value, combining some truly magnificent circus sets with wonderful costumes, comic clown acts and the 60-girl chorus line in some of the most magnificent of the night's costumes. The other noticeably "not for children" act was here, when a borderline-dominatrix "lion trainer" was working to bring a pack of very sexy lionesses under her control in a fairly steamy dance number.
And yet moments later we were back to Disney as a troupe of dancers dressed as jockeys promenaded around with adorable miniature horses.
Despite the fame of the Moulin Rouge's dancing girls, it's the guest acts between scenes that are most impressive. There's a contortionist who winds her body into knots with ease, seeming to defy both the laws of gravity and the existence of a skeletal infrastructure. Two brawny acrobat-cum-gymnasts do a series of moves with lifts and balances that take the combination of grace and strength to an extreme. Most memorable, however, is a male-female roller skating act. The couple perform on an elevated, circular stage perhaps 10 feet across. In this tiny space they manage to work up remarkable speeds, then do seemingly death-defying spins and lifts, moving at high speed and always seemingly just a few inches from plummeting off the edge of their circular stage. Both the contortionist and the female roller skater did their acts fully clothed.
The main show runs from 9pm without a break and wraps at 10:30. Everyone's encouraged to leave promptly as the staff turns the table settings with a blinding speed to match the skaters'. The next performance starts at 11 and the punters are already lined up in that lobby next door. The show goes on. And, I suspect, will keep going on for many years to come, despite ... or perhaps because of ... its odd feeling of being frozen in time.
No photography is allowed inside the Moulin Rouge, so I've borrowed these publicity shots from their web site. To get the full effect, you'll need to imagine a layer stripped off the girls' costumes. The web site, amusingly, gives no hint at the show's distinctive USP.
The experience is part old-style Vegas show, part Cirque du Soleil and part theme park production. With breasts. Lots and lots of naked breasts. At times is was almost comic, as lovely costumes had panels awkwardly cut out to tick the boob requirement. When I was a child, I believe this kind of thing was big in Vegas and called a "topless review". Those shows are long gone from The Strip but thriving at the Moulin Rouge. It seemed a bizarre contradiction in these days of #metoo and gender equality, but it was hard to get offended when most of the dancing was about as sexy as a Disney Princesses parade.
I did, however, find myself a bit irritated at the lack of parity in costuming. While the troupe of 60 women was parading around showing off most of their assets, the 20 or so male dancers left almost everything to the imagination. Why didn't I get to appreciate more six packs and taught thighs instead of cheesy sequinned suits? Hey ho.
We booked through Viator on Trip Advisor, which was able to offer dinner show tickets when the main Moulin Rouge web site was sold out. It was only a few euro more expensive than the direct price and featured transport back to any hotel in the Paris city centre. (Tip: If your plans are flexible we saw that Viator drops the price of unsold tickets on the evening of the show in their Place de la Concorde office, from which the excursion departs. Swing by here between 5:30 and 6 and you may get a last minute deal.) Without discounts, the evening is roughly the equivalent of good seats in the stalls of a London show, plus a top-quality pre-theatre dinner, and pre-show and interval drinks at the theatre. Is it worth it?
Yes, for a one-time experience, though I wouldn't return.
You do, to be fair, get two shows for the price of one. As everyone is getting seated and having dinner there's a band on stage with two excellent singers. Ironically, rather than delivering expected classics like La Vie en Rose and La Mer, the tuxedo-clad crew is sliding out Vegas standards from the Rat Pack and Nat King Cole. It just didn't seem right to be perusing a lovely French menu as the chanteuse rolled into "well it goes from St. Louis, down through Missouri, Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty..."
Though there are some tables for two tucked away around the back edges of the auditorium, most of the seating is at long, narrow tables of eight or more radiating out from the crescent of the stage like rays from a child's drawing of the sun. Each consecutive circle of tables sits on a curved terrace above the ones below; it looked like everyone would have an excellent view. Tables went right up to the stage on the side but there was an intriguing rectangle left clear in the middle. Clearly, the show would be projecting into the audience.
The main show consists of four "scenes" interspersed with guest acts. The scenes are long musical numbers that tell a story, almost like mini-musicals with custom written scores and different "stars" called out of the line-up. Costumes are a very big deal; there's a lot of promenading to the music as you appreciate the feathers, sequins and breasts. The first, "The Moulin Rouge Yesterday and Today", and the last, "The Moulin Rouge from 1900 to ..." are remarkably similar, other than the fact that the last is the one that has the obligatory can-can number. The second, "The Pirates", is pure Disney, with princesses pining for love, dancing corsairs waving their blades and even a love duet with a turbaned prince and princess flying over the audience on wires. Very Aladdin.
The third scene, "Au Cirque" was probably the best for pure entertainment value, combining some truly magnificent circus sets with wonderful costumes, comic clown acts and the 60-girl chorus line in some of the most magnificent of the night's costumes. The other noticeably "not for children" act was here, when a borderline-dominatrix "lion trainer" was working to bring a pack of very sexy lionesses under her control in a fairly steamy dance number.
Despite the fame of the Moulin Rouge's dancing girls, it's the guest acts between scenes that are most impressive. There's a contortionist who winds her body into knots with ease, seeming to defy both the laws of gravity and the existence of a skeletal infrastructure. Two brawny acrobat-cum-gymnasts do a series of moves with lifts and balances that take the combination of grace and strength to an extreme. Most memorable, however, is a male-female roller skating act. The couple perform on an elevated, circular stage perhaps 10 feet across. In this tiny space they manage to work up remarkable speeds, then do seemingly death-defying spins and lifts, moving at high speed and always seemingly just a few inches from plummeting off the edge of their circular stage. Both the contortionist and the female roller skater did their acts fully clothed.
The main show runs from 9pm without a break and wraps at 10:30. Everyone's encouraged to leave promptly as the staff turns the table settings with a blinding speed to match the skaters'. The next performance starts at 11 and the punters are already lined up in that lobby next door. The show goes on. And, I suspect, will keep going on for many years to come, despite ... or perhaps because of ... its odd feeling of being frozen in time.
No photography is allowed inside the Moulin Rouge, so I've borrowed these publicity shots from their web site. To get the full effect, you'll need to imagine a layer stripped off the girls' costumes. The web site, amusingly, gives no hint at the show's distinctive USP.
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