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The Broadway exclamation point — once a marquee staple, later an overused joke — makes a roaring comeback with “Moulin Rouge!” This new musical, based on the Baz Luhrmann movie set in and around the fabled Parisian nightclub of the title, certainly earns its breathless punctuation mark. How eager is this show to dazzle and daze us into submission? Well, consider that the confetti gun, usually used to send the audience home in a festive mood, comes out near the top of the first act, spraying silver and gold paper out into the audience. (Fear not, if you find yourself disappointingly unbedazzled: It’s brought out later for an encore.) 

Once the Insta-orgy dies down, director Alex Timbers (late of Beetlejuice) draws us into the action instantly with the irresistible French-tinged anthem “Lady Marmalade.” If you’re a fan of Luhrmann’s movie, you’ll surely recall the chart-topping soundtrack cover by Christina Aguilera, Lil’ Kim, Mya, and Pink. If you don’t know the film, you might remember Patti LaBelle singing the original disco-funk version and the then-controversial lyric “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir.” This is our welcome to the Moulin Rouge: It’s where “sparkling diamond” Satine descends from the ceiling to perform; it’s where Christian first glimpses and falls desperately in love with her; it’s where the Duke of Monroth (Tam Mutu) decides he must possess her; it’s where painter Toulouse-Lautrec (Sahr Ngaujah), Christian, and tango dancer Santiago (Ricky Rojas) plan to produce their Bohemian Rhapsody. And it’s all presided over by ringmaster/emcee Harold Zidler (six-time Tony nominee and character actor extraordinaire Danny Burstein): “Welcome, you gorgeous collection of reprobates and rascals, artistes and arrivistes, soubrettes and sodomites,” he proclaims with a deliciously lewd grin.

Baz Luhrmann's playfully postmodern riff on the Hollywood movie musical set in fin de siècle Paris gets amped up for the stage, with Karen Olivo and Aaron Tveit stepping into roles played onscreen by Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor. Moulin Rouge! was Baz Luhrmann at his most brashly baroque, a shameless pop-cultural magpie molding equal parts kitsch, cool and cliché into a rhapsodic dream. The giddy 2001 screen collision of soaring romance and dazzling artifice helped resuscitate the movie musical. Stage director Alex Timbers and the creative team on this delirious theatrical reinvention take those Luhrmann impulses and run with them, crafting a gaudy and gorgeous jukebox pastiche in which eye-popping spectacle, off-the-charts energy and almost non-stop musical mashups provide the plush padding for a featherweight plot.

The show is A LOT, in every sense, both intoxicating and exhausting in its unrelenting visual and sonic assault. But it virtually defies you not to be entertained.