As promised, the We Will Rock You review. Where do I begin? I’ll just start typing and see what comes up.

The play truly was Queen Heaven. To paraphrase the wrong sort of Queen-based subject, it was victorious, happy and glorious! The songs that featured in the play were Innuendo, Radio Gaga, I Want to Break Free, Somebody to Love, Killer Queen, Play the Game, Under Pressure, A Kind of Magic, I Want It All, Headlong, No-One But You (Only the Good Die Young), Crazy Little Thing Called Love, Ogre Battle, One Vision, Who Wants to Live Forever, Flash, Seven Seas of Rhye, Fat Bottomed Girls, Hammer to Fall, These Are the Days of Our Lives, Bicycle Race, We Will Rock You, We Are the Champions, and the encore song, which I think you can very easily guess! If I had to niggle a little about the song choices, I was a tad disappointed that Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy didn’t feature in the show. But apart from that, I don’t think a Queen fan like me could complain vociferously about a show with 25 Queen hits.

The play was held in the Dominion Theatre, which was GINORMOUS. I got vertigo just looking up at the ceiling! What didn’t help was having my mind’s eye playing disaster-movie-influenced images and videos of the chandelier and ceiling caving in and crushing everybody to smithereens. I had never been in a West End theatre so gimassive; the last two plays I saw were The 39 Steps and The Woman in Black (the latter of which I might do I blog post on when I can), which were held in really small auditoriums.

Since the play was by Ben Elton, I was expecting it to be very silly…and innuendoes (the choice of first song must have been a warning to the audience of what kind of humour they were going to expect). We Will Rock You was set in the future on iPlanet (formerly Earth), which is under the control of Killer Queen and her company Globalsoft: a corporation as massive as WALL-E’s BnL that bans live music, instruments and songs and instead feeds computerised identikit auto-tuned pop to the masses. The population are essentially Invasion of the Body Snatcher clones that all have the same tastes, clothes and personalities. They are all the result of Radio Gaga. In fact, the female clones are all called GagGa Girls! The hero is Galileo, who hears lyrics and music from the days of rock ‘n’ roll — “the Dreamer” that the rebels to Globalsoft (the Bohemians) have been searching for so long for. The heroine is Scaramouche: an underdog and an outcast to the Gaga Girls, for she dreams of more than being a Gaga girl. The story then develops into a hunt for the mythical “Place of Champions”, which is said to hide the last ever musical instrument, which Globalsoft has been destroying many of for years. Galileo and Scaramouche later learn of the “Place of Champions” through the Bohemians, who worship the ancient musical text that is Bohemian Rhapsody. Yes, there are constant references to the song, but throughout the story, the song is never performed in full!

The show is full of jokes. There are the Queen jokes (“Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?” “You want me to have sex with ya?”). There are the cultural, musical jokes (“Rock ‘n’ Roll was destroyed in three words: HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL”/”Who is Tinky Winky? Who’s Dipsy? Who’s La La? And who’s…Po?”/”It was buried…in a place of towers…and skyscrapers…and it was called…WEMBLEY ARENA!”). There are the jokes that were either added as updates to the script, or were probably a result of improvisation (“”The rest of the [Bohemian Rhapsody] tape was taped over…by some show called…The Only Way is Essex! What–a bunch–of TWATS!”). And then there are the innuendo jokes (“You make me go limp…(look down, then back up again) with excitement!”).

The play was as cliched and exaggerated as Mamma Mia in spirit, but the story surprised me in how different it was in style to Mamma Mia’s. The play had a deservedly long, whooping, cheering standing ovation at the end, plus three curtain calls and an encore! However, it wasn’t a genius laugh-a-minute joy of a play like The 39 Steps and it wasn’t completely engaging throughout like The Woman in Black was, although I guess you can’t really compare this play to what I’ve seen at the West End. However, if you love Queen, and you don’t mind listening to High School Musical, The Only Way Is Essex and pop music in general being mocked and jokedly laughed at, then I thoroughly recommend you go see this; it’s a feel-good play that will make you beam and sing.

RATING: 4/5