We Will Rock You!!!
I wasn’t sure what to expect with the musical based around Queen’s greatest hits, but it definitely was a sound and lighting masterpiece.
Warning: this is a spoiler so don’t read it unless you really want to know.
Held at the Dominion Theatre, which has to be the biggest theatre we’ve been in so far, our seats were pretty good. We were up in the dress circle but we had a straight view of the whole stage. The front of the stage had the big steel arch which holds all the lights, and two guys had to sit up on either side moving the lights. That structure continued back through the stage, where the band were sitting on either side – half-way up in mid-air!
When it first started I didn’t see how there could be any more than just the one set structure they had out at the time, but the stage was so big it had heaps of trap doors, structures that lifted up and down, and even spun around hanging mid-air over the audience. So in the end there were about ten different stage backdrops, with such a huge stage you’d think they’s have to lower the curtains for each change, but most of the time they were changed right in front of our eyes because the floodlights were focusing on one event, they were singing a song, or the flashing lights were going around and around blocking our view.
The actual story was set 300 years in the future, where computer generated pop ruled the galaxy, and all teenagers ate the same thing, danced the same robotic dances and thought the same thoughts. Except for the rebels, or bohemians, who were in search of a time before all that, a time of rock and roll, where you could dance and move with freedom. They say the cause of the end of rock and roll was from the beginning of the 21st century when the formulation of boy bands and girl bands who didn’t sing their own songs, play their own instruments of write their own lyrics was growing and overtaking real music. Get the point?
There was also bagging of reality TV, with the mention of how crap Big Brother is, which got long cheers from the audience.The comedy in the play was great, it was literally a play on how fake everything is turning, into a society driven by computer generated songs for the masses. It must be updated a lot because there were many jokes, whether for Londoners, stuff about Britney Spears’ head shaving incident, and many other non-talented and talented musicians.
The plot began with the graduation of students who were all dancing their robotic dance. There were two in the class of graduates who stood out, yes, boy and girl. The guy was Galileo Figaro, and the British girl later got the name of Scaramouch, or as she said it sounded like…Scary bush! She was great, the constant eye-rolling duh sarcasm that had us in fits of laughter. The ruler of the galaxy, the killer queen(!), had her henchmen hunt the bohemians down and destroy their minds, making them robotic like everyone else, while the bohos hunt down the dreamer – Galileo, or Gaaza as Scaramouch called him, so he can go on a quest for the holy grail of rock and roll – an electric guitar. Which he can’t play, she can, and does, belt out a smashing tune (it was actually Brian May who was in the band pit).
Not only did it include (rather interestingly but it worked really well!!!) most of Queen’s greatest hits, but they also had about six huge moving LCD screens which they used to set some of the dance scenes. Some of the graphics were pretty awesome.At the end, after the first curtain call, the words came up on the curtain: “Do you really want to hear Bohemian Rhapsody?” The audience went wild. It comes up: “Are you sure?” To the answer of YEAH! And so they all came back onto the stage and performed again, finishing with a standing ovation from the audience. Yep, I stood up too!
I had a real blast and we went home on the tube, toes tapping, hands clapping.
Tags: Travel
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