Two weeks ago, I went to see Moulin Rouge on Broadway. It’s a popular show, and I’d wanted to see it for a while, so when the Thursday matinee popped up in my student discount deals, I jumped at the chance. I took my mother and sister along – they’re big fans of the movie it’s based on – and we headed down to the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on 45th Street with high hopes.

Now, I know that in Broadway terms, Moulin Rouge is old news. It opened in 2019 and it’s been raking in the cash ever since, grossing millions at the box office. People love it, and one bad review won’t change that. But I didn’t like it. My mother was overwhelmed, and my sister downright hated it.

Like the movie, the play is a jukebox musical, meaning it uses well-known, previously written songs, rather than originals, and builds the story around them. The movie was made in 2001 and largely sticks to music from a few decades before that – Elton John, David Bowie and the like. There’s some cohesion going on, a commitment to genre. The play, in an attempt to update the track list, abandons that completely.

“When they started singing Katy Perry I almost got up and left,” my sister said. We both visibly cringed hearing the music of our youth invade this play, and we endured it over and over – Beyonce, Rihanna, and worse.

It’s not that I don’t like Rihanna. Her music is as nostalgic for me as it is for the millennials who sing the play’s praises. But it felt out of place, inauthentic, a lazy commercial cop out. I had such powerful secondhand embarrassment watching the actors spin around singing “Shut Up and Dance,” an achingly generic radio pop hit from 2014. This was Broadway, and they were singing the songs we heard in middle school gym class. It was a letdown.

I know how I sound right now, so I’ll admit it. My sister and I are theater snobs. We both grew up in the Shadowland Acting Academy, and we absolutely adore a good live show. It’s in our blood, and we take it perhaps a little too seriously.

But apart from our personal principles about what kind of music belongs on Broadway, all the new genres turned Moulin Rouge into a big old mess. It jumped from song to song in seconds, endlessly referential, never building up or dialing down, just charging full steam ahead through the repertoire, packed with something for everybody. And you know what it felt like? Doomscrolling. Like the repetitive flicks of dopamine you get as you swipe from one soundbite to the next on social media. There was no musical arc to follow, the volume was consistently at a 10. That’s what overwhelmed my mother. It was a barrage just like the ones in our video feeds.

I’ve noticed the tiktokification of art elsewhere, in movies like Barbie and Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won Best Picture in 2023. They’re self-reflexive and extremely meme-able, that’s how we like it these days. If I wind up in the film industry, I’ll come up against this – how to entertain attention spans that are battered by social media. And at the end of the day, art has to make money. It just felt so alien to see it on a century-old stage.

All of this is of very little consequence, I just had to rant. I wanted to love Moulin Rouge, and I didn’t. So for the rest of the season, I think I’d best stick to the Shadowland.