By Ben Antao

Would you pay 154 euros for dinner and cabaret at the famous Moulin Rouge in Paris? It depends on how much of Paris you want to soak in and the size of your wallet, of course.

MY WIFE Marinella and I had signed up for a ten-day tour of France with Globus in September 2009. Seeing that two days in Paris with the guided tour wouldn’t be sufficient to cover the essential sights in that eternal city of lights, we flew in from Toronto two days early to explore the museums and the city on our own. After a day at Versailles and another in the vast museum of Louvre, we joined the tour group on September 19 at the hotel Pullman Paris Bercy (1 rue de Libourne) in the southeast on the left bank of Seine. During the drive to dinner at the restaurant Montebello Place in the Latin Quarter, Filipe, the tour guide, told us what we were going to do the next day. After a morning tour of the city with a local guide, he suggested an optional visit to Versailles in the afternoon and a cabaret show at the Moulin Rouge at night. As we had already visited Versailles on our own, we spent the afternoon at the D’Orsay museum where the works of the French impressionist painters are showcased.

Both of us were excited for the opportunity to check out the legendary Moulin Rouge, situated in the bohemian section of Montmartre in the north, about 45 minutes from our hotel. During the drive, Filipe gave us some background to the Red Windmill (Moulin Rouge) that began its act on October 6, 1889 with a group of young girls dancing the Quadrille with boisterous movements and rhythms, lifting their frilly and flowing skirts, showing their legs and revealing their underwear in a brand new dance, now known as the French Cancan. The place is always full, he said, with two shows every night, six times a week. The dinner show that night had attracted 1000 patrons and another 1000 would come in later for the 11:30 performance paying €92 each, sans dinner of course.

PLUSH THEATRE

THE burgundy plush theatre was humming with ineffable excitement when we entered and took our seats at the tables reserved for our group flush to the stage where a quintet of musicians played mood music, with a smiling female singer warming up the audience with her Parisian songs. The three-course dinner began at 7:30, giving the patrons enough time to dance if they wished on the floor close to the stage prior to the 1 hour and 45-minute show to begin at 9 pm. Filipe had earlier encouraged us to dance a bit if only to say that "you’ve danced at the Moulin Rouge." The dinner came with an appetiser (päté de foie gras), grilled chicken or salmon with vegetables, chocolate mousse or ice cream, and coffee. Red and white wine was included as well as a complimentary bottle of champagne at each table. After dinner, Marinella and I engaged in a foxtrot or two.

Precisely at nine, the cabaret opened with a clash of cymbals and fast-paced rousing music followed by male dancers in tights and leggy women in leotards zipping across the stage in a frenzy of high kicks, arms flailing, torsos twisting, as if affected by sheer lust for living, daring the audience to feel their energy and zest for love. Each dance routine was followed by another, at once more extravagant in movement, colourful costumes, feathers, rhinestones and sequins, wild headgear and high boots, each dancer gyrating, high stepping, and landing in splits to the gorgeous syncopation of choreographed symmetry.

While the principal dancers and performers changed their costumes, the stage was given over to circus acts, clowns doing acrobatics, Siamese twins, weird wild animals, a juggler showing off his skills by twirling not two but five sticks in the air, and a ventriloquist regaling the audience with bird, dog, and horse talk. Suddenly, the section of the stage where we’d danced earlier was transformed into a green pool of water with pythons swimming in it. Even as the audience was gasping with amazement at this ingenious contraption, the principal female dancer dove into this pool, played with and caressed the snakes, and emerged appearing wildly exhilarated with her daring act. This sideshow felt surreal in the midst of the magical dance and song of the main cabaret, but it was all part of the play, done in good fun.

JOIE DE VIVRE

STILL after this came the rousing high-energy Cancan performed by 28 chorus girls in frilly white, red and blue petticoats, literally stepping up their joie de vivre in elegant style, high-kicking and splitting as if there’s no other time to be alive than now. A ten-minute long Cancan was more than enough to send the audience into bursts of applause.

As if this were not enough, another chorus of 20 "nude" girls followed the Cancan dancers to titillate the voyeurs with their topless shakes and shrugs, their young bodies and shapely legs in net stockings moving sinuously, joyously, with dramatic intensity yet flowing free-spiritedly as if propelled by a conscious tsunami of sexuality.

Earlier on our way to the Moulin Rouge, Filipe had told us that the origins of the Cancan began in the 1820s when a free-spirited young woman would enter a café, have a drink and dance to her heart’s content, lifting her skirt high and showing her legs. When the owner saw that the male patrons liked her erotic dancing and applauded her, he invited her to come in every day and dance in his bar, for which he paid her. As time passed, the woman became an alcoholic and eventually disappeared from the scene. However, the individual dance that she performed was later choreographed for a group of women and that’s how the Cancan began in 1889, the first centenary of the French Revolution.

The cabaret ended on time at 10:45 and when we emerged from the theatre, I could see a long line of young people on the boulevard de Clichy for tickets to the next show. In answer to a question, our guide said that most of the dancers were in their 20s, no one was over the age of 35. To get a shot to dance at Moulin Rouge is a great achievement for the girls, many of whom came from Russia and Eastern Europe. "It’s a chance for some to make it to Las Vegas," he said.