Danielle, Nathan, Pauline and I headed off to the Lyric Theatre last night to see We will rock you. This is a musical written by Ben Elton and uses Queen songs to tell the story.
The show is on it’s last weeks in Brisbane and even though Danielle booked a few weeks ago she managed to get us some excellent seats in row F in the stalls. We were so close we had eye contact with the performers – which was spooky cause some of them had scary eyes.
Ben Elton seems to write the same sort of characters in all his books and he carried this on to the musical. He likes to have an old guy who is kind of a loner, a bumbling hero, a sassy and strong female and some odd Australians. It also reminded me of Tank Girl a little. The story is basically about the commercialisation of music and what could happen if people stop playing music for love and start playing it just for money.
The performers were great but it did seem a bit lacklustre at points, like in the villan scenes. I’m putting it down to the fact that they didn’t have the best Queen songs to pick from (they were reserved for the good guys) although Radio Ga Ga was brilliant at the beginning. The performance really picked up when Britney and Oz came on stage – Britney ended up being my favourite character (I’ll never say that about the other Britney).
The musical had the feel of an english pantomine, they didn’t quite talk to the audience but they had adapted the script to use Australian characters such as Little Johnny and Nikki Webster. I wonder who the John character is in the English and American versions as the jokes would only make sense here? There was even a reference to the gabba! They got us to clap and wave our hands and if smoking was allowed at the Lyric I’m sure they would have gotten us to sway with lighters in the slow songs.
We had one of the understudies as Galileo and although he was good I would be interested to compare him to the proper guy. The guy who is playing the character in the English production (Mig Ayesa)is also and aussie and played Joe on the ferals. I didn’t know he played the boyfriend in a Jo Beth Taylor video in the 90s. Oh how the mighty have fallen. 😉
This was Pauline’s first time at a proper broadway type musical and although she didn’t quite jump around at the end adrenaline pumping (she’s not really the type), I could tell that her pulse rate had gone up a bit. Especially when we got back to the car and she went digging around for Queen tapes in the back seat. 😉
Excellent fun had by all and well worth the $70 it cost to go!