“Moulin Rouge!” has come to the Kentucky Performing Arts Center from Feb. 18 through March 2, 2025. This tale of love and greed set in Belle Epoque era Paris displays the core Bohemian ideals (truth, beauty, freedom and love) through various aspects of the show. Let’s take a look at how the show captures each of these values, starting with Love.

“Diamonds are forever.” Those are the first words Satine, played by Arianna Rosario, sings as she descends from the rafters. Her words could initially be taken as merely the greed of a vain prostitute. That interpretation is thrown out the window as she continues on, explaining that unlike men, diamonds can’t hurt her. Her obsession with diamonds is not out of vanity, but out of her disillusion with men and her fear of destitution. She isn’t thinking about love, which she sees as an idealistic dream that most do not have the time or money to chase after. 

Satine’s opening song, “The Sparkling Diamond,” is a flashy number that alerts the audience to the impossible choice faced by women of the Belle Epoque era; the choice between seeking love or seeking financial support. 

This choice is exemplified through the two male leads of the show, Christian, played by Christian Douglas, and The Duke of Monroth, played by Andrew Brewer. Christian is a poor composer who has just arrived in Paris, ready to live a life according to the Bohemian ideals. The Duke is the opposite, a wealthy man who does not seek love and lives a life fueled by lust and greed. 

These differences can clearly be seen in each man’s reaction to meeting Satine. Satine initially  believes that Christian is the Duke. Christian’s  completely oblivious attitude shows that he has no ill intentions towards Satine. Upon realizing this, Satine and Christian share an emotional song expressing their desire to be together, despite the circumstances keeping them apart. The real Duke’s first private encounter comes later. He wastes no time in getting what he wants, ripping the sleeves of her robe off before assaulting her. 

The Duke agrees to sponsor a show Satine, Christian and their friends are putting on, though he later makes his support conditional on the fact that Satine will belong to him. This forces Satine and Christian to meet in secret. The Duke showers her with expensive gifts, all with the expectation that Satine will stop performing and live with the sole purpose of  being his consort. 

This forces Satine into an impossible situation. She isn’t getting any younger, and can’t be a dancer at the Moulin Rouge forever. If she doesn’t find a way to get financial support, she will end up out on the streets. The Duke’s enticing offer would provide her with financial security, but leave her stuck with an abusive, controlling man who only cares about her appearance. She would have to sacrifice her love for performing, her love for Christian and her independence. Choreography is used to represent this sacrifice. When the Duke insists Satine wear clothes that reflect the extravagant, completely impractical fashions of the wealthy, a group of men carry her into the air as pallbearers would hoist a coffin. 

Though “Moulin Rouge!” is a bright rollercoaster of emotional drama, its central themes reflect the attitudes of the late 19th and early 20th century. In both the United States and Europe, only about 20% of women were employed and earned wages. Those who did work were usually young and unmarried, and made little money. Since most women did not make their own money, finding a means of financial support through men was essential. This led to situations like Satine’s, where money had to be prioritized over love. “Moulin Rouge!” seeks to reject this ranking of priorities in showing that while the Duke can support her, Christian is the one who will make her happy with their mutual love, so love must prevail in the end.  

Reflecting on the conditions faced by women of the past shows both how far we have come and how much we still have to do. Roughly 57% of women in America participated in the labor market in 2022, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is certainly an improvement from 1900, though women still only earn roughly 82% of what men earn. 

The Moulin Rouge nightclub is, according to the opening number, everything sacred about unfettered capitalism incarnate. Harold, the owner, welcomes the audience with the promise that every desire they’ve harbored so closely and shamefully will be met in his almost magical complex. But, while the play is mostly devoted to unraveling the magician’s tricks, that theme is nothing without the realization that there are tricks. Even though it saves its workers from the streets and saves its patrons from society, reality becomes clear: the magic of consciousness is not without its tricks, and in a human world, like the Moulin Rouge, no one is actually free. 

The performers are easy evidence for this, and they’re certainly no stranger to inhibitions on their freedom, but the more compelling example is in the manager himself, Harold Zidler. 

Harold sacrifices everything he believes in—including, as the show goes on, his love for his employees—to preserve his own livelihood. He wants to be a Bohemian free spirit, but he ends up even more beholden to the corrupt and the moneyed than he would have been in any other career—and, to poison the sword, he has to act happy while performing to keep a roof over his head. He treats the audience like Moulin Rouge clubbers, but there’s one key difference: the usual attendees don’t see backstage. 

They don’t see the penny-pinching or the worry, just the smile that he puts on so there can be less to worry about. He isn’t free, and him finding beauty, love or truth is out of the question. It’s the same paradox Satine faces when she stays with the Duke despite his abuse just to stay fed: it’s seeking freedom that takes even more of it away. Entertaining the Bohemian fantasy to illustrate my point: if she did leave the Duke, she’d be alone and destitute, afraid of what every stranger may want from her. Not exactly the epitome of freedom. 

But money is only the second driver of the plot. Even if the club ran perfectly, the constant spectre of illness would be enough tragedy to fill two acts. 

Tuberculosis, the disease that attacks one of the show’s central characters, was believed not too long before “Moulin Rouge”’s setting to be an illness that was inherited and particularly affected literary, sad-eyed, bon vivant romantics. It was so beatified and romanticized that its sullen cheeks and gasping breaths were seen as hallmarks of feminine beauty—and they’re exactly the signs that the patient is dying. 

It was only about 20 years before the show is set that Robert Koch discovered TB’s real cause: a bacterium. Immediately, it became associated not with wealth or beauty but with the people of the streets. This—from ankle-length dresses to clean-shaven men—also influenced beauty standards, even though neither of those things relates to how TB, a respiratory disease, is spread. The truth, in a time without modern cures, was bleaker: TB infects indiscriminately, and if you had it, your survival was a roll of cosmic dice. 

In either way of looking at it—societally or epidemiologically—the characters aren’t free. They’re limited either by the misunderstandings of their time and their lack of the privilege to reconcile them, or by the whims of nature itself. It’s telling that so much of Bohemians’ “freedom” comes from alcohol: are they trying to expand the world, or forget it? 

Between the set, the costumes, the dancing and the singing, there is no shortage of beauty in “Moulin Rouge!.” While this reflects beauty in the traditional sense, “Moulin Rouge!” also offers commentary on the true meaning of beauty and the dangers of superficiality. 

The Moulin Rouge is a sparkling paradise in the midst of the slums of Paris. In this impoverished part of town, the wealthy flock to the Moulin Rouge to party with the dancers, conveniently ignoring the miserable conditions around them. This can be seen in the differences of the set design in scenes featuring the Moulin Rouge and those on the streets. The Moulin Rouge features bright, expensive, eccentric decorations that make the club seem far more well off than it is. Then the set changes, and the audience is shown the dreary, grey wasteland that is the slums of Paris. The set differences clearly show the audience that while the Bohemians have their heads in the clouds, they have next to nothing in material wealth. 

However, the Bohemians are unbothered by their lack of funds. They are content to live a life fueled by their ideals, not wealth. Their attitude towards life stands in stark contrast to that of the Duke, who repeatedly reminds the audience that money is the only thing that matters. These two attitudes show that there are many ways to define beauty and that money is not needed to find beauty in life. 

The Duke tries to force this materialistic lifestyle onto Satine as well. Following a semi-coerced interaction between the Duke and Satine, the Duke informs her that it is time for her to “dress the part” and that he intends to “make her right.” These statements are followed by a scene showing Satine being forced to change from an outfit that blends the fashions of the wealthy and those of the slums to one that is completely in line with what the wealthy deems fashionable. This includes: a tight corset and ridiculously long dress train to limit her mobility, a large hat that limits her vision and a muff that prevents her from using her hands. While the clothes are beautiful, they represent the ugly life that the Duke wishes for her to live; completely dependent on him and relegated to nothing more than a doll for him to do with as he pleases. 

“Moulin Rouge!” challenges the idea that money is what makes a life beautiful by showing that while money can buy surface level beauty, it has the opposite effect on the heart. Christian and his Bohemian friends are impoverished, but are morally good and seek to create art for the sake of art, not for the sake of profit. On the other hand, the Duke lives an illustrious life filled with plenty of beautiful things. Yet he never once displays a shred of goodness or morality, instead abusing and controlling those around him to fulfill his own selfish desires. 

The play is set somewhere around the time that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche decimated the objective fact–based framework of the Enlightenment, but it doesn’t focus on the fact that truth doesn’t exist. Truth just doesn’t matter. 

It doesn’t matter that the moneyed suppress the needs of the entertainers they “own”; no matter how romantic or mystical its opponent, money talks. It doesn’t matter that the Moulin Rouge’s performers are aging and getting sick; the lights need to stay on, and the stage lights help do that.

If anything, “Rouge” is an asterisk on the Enlightenment’s unrestrained promises. Wealthy men with nice suits and long books may belove the beauties of free markets in their mansions and lecture halls, but their ideas lead to businesses—and their employees—being bought and sold to the person with the deepest pockets, not the sharpest mind. Hardly a forum for philosophical inquiry.