TORONTO - Irony isn't supposed to be the point of a musical like We Will Rock You, yet another Mamma Mia!-like showcase of iconic '70s hits wrapped around a plot as heavy as a neutrino. And yet, there it is, right in the premise of this airbrushed paean to the music of Queen which opened at the Canon Theatre Tuesday.
The chirpily-dystopian premise is that American Idol, boy bands and other forms of corporate shill, killed rock 'n' roll some 300 years before this musical takes place on Planet Mall. Enter the Bohemians, young rockers waiting for the moment to step up and rescue us from corporate "ga ga." The irony: We Will Rock You resembles nothing so much as an American Idol tribute to Queen -- with a cast of scrubbed, smiling young people singing the songs of Freddie Mercury et al with technical precision, boundless enthusiasm and utter edgelessness.
With her purple hair and hint-o'-goth clothing, the female lead Scaramouche (Erica Peck) seems a dead ringer for the most recent AI "rock chick" Gina Glocksen. And the next most important actress, Suzie McNeil (who plays a rock-warrior princess named Oz) actually was a finalist on the reality series Rock Star. Of course, you don't have to write very much about a musical like We Will Rock You before you start to overthink it.
Suffice to say that the actors are all very good singers. And if you separate Queen fans into demographic sub-sets, the AI watchers will enjoy it far more than the classic rock radio listeners will. With 25 singalong-able songs from the Queen canon, it has that big-musical infectiousness that has audiences waving their arms and glowsticks in a display of happy unison that evokes that great line by the multitudes in The Life Of Brian, "Yes!
We are all individuals!" The music is fine. But the book .
.. Ben Elton wrote this?
The sublime wit who wrote the brilliant Blackadder? Was he shaking off the anaesthetic in post-op when he wrote this series of egregious puns and groaning song-lyric-based wordplay? "Oh my," says the evil henchman Khashoggi (played to Aryan perfection by Evan Buliung) on spotting our hero Galileo (Yvan Pedneault) in the opening moments, "do I see a little silhouetto of a spy?
" And that's one of the good ones. Speaking in lyric-snippets (with a pronounced French-Canadian accent) is actually supposed to be Galileo's turf. He's "The Dreamer" of prophecy, who unconsciously speaks the words of "the sacred texts" (actually old rock lyrics).
And so, when threatened, he'll say "Help! I need somebody. Help!
Not just anybody." And when it's pointed out that he lives in a hi-tech paradise, it's the signal for him to break into I Want To Break Free. You get the picture.
There aren't really a lot of big laughs in We Will Rock You. When it's not mired in weak punnery, it stoops to smarmy double entendres unworthy of Benny Hill, let alone Ben Elton. "The legend is a myth.
Or the myth is a legend, whichever you like," Khashoggi says to his boss, the pulchritudinous Killer Queen (big-voiced Alana Bridgewater). "I like it both ways," she says. "So I hear," he answers.
There's some equally witty banter about her "Brazilian wax" and the phrase "eager beaver." And the weirdest one of all, the obligatory local reference re-write included a non sequitur about how "the Canadarm fisted the Hubble space telescope." Despite his accent and problematic syllable placement (he, of course, invites Scaramouche to "do the fan-dang-GO"), Pedneault is quite good vocally, covering most of Mercury's formidable range with apparent ease -- particularly on Under Pressure and Bohemian Rhapsody.
And considering that none of the characters is actually fleshed out, Jack Langedijk manages to almost make a person out of his hippie comic-relief character Pop, as does Sterling Jarvis as the testosterone-charged, kilt-clad rocker with the improbable name of Britney Spears. In the end, however, the fun can't overcome the ga-ga.
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