Moulin Rouge! The Musical does something unusual with the theatre itself: the design spills off the stage and takes over the auditorium, so the room is already part of the show before anything starts. Audiences are encouraged to arrive early rather than slide into a seat as the lights go down, because a good deal of the atmosphere is in the building.
Musically it works by collision. The film's approach of cutting pop songs together is pushed further on stage, with mashups that fold several familiar hits into a single number, ranging across decades. If you know the film you will recognise the spine of it, but the song list is not the film's song list and it has kept changing across productions.
The story is a tragedy dressed as a party: a love triangle in a Paris nightclub, told at high volume with a great deal of spectacle before it turns. That shift catches some audiences off guard, particularly those who came expecting a straightforward feel-good night. It is loud, it is fast, and the second act is much darker than the first.
Seats reward a central position more than a close one. The staging uses depth and the full width of the house, and several sequences are designed around symmetry that only reads from the middle. The front rows put you inside the spectacle at the cost of seeing its shape. Where a production has boxes or side seating built into the design, those are experiences rather than good sightlines, and are priced as such.
Runtime is around two hours and thirty-five minutes with an interval. PickStub is an independent marketplace and is not affiliated with the producers of Moulin Rouge! The Musical or with the theatres staging it.