Review: We Will Rock You, New Wimbledon Theatre

God Save The Queen! New Wimbledon Theatre happens to be hosting the 20th anniversary UK tour of We Will Rock You in Platinum Jubilee week, and a fine alternative monarch it has to offer us. Jenny O’Leary plays the sadistic Killer Queen, half algorithm, half human and 100% nasty, with a voice that could smash mirrors and a personality strong enough to rip telephone directories in two. The devil always gets the best tunes, and this juke box musical certainly gives the Killer Queen most of the best numbers. From It’s A Kind of Magic to The Show Must Go On, and from Fat-Bottomed Girls (which came with an naughty dance routine, including two ‘girl’ dancers who weren’t girls at all) to a high camp rendition of Don’t Stop Me Now, the Killer Queen is given many of Queen’s greatest hits, including most of the ones that make you want to leap to your feet and join in.

Opening night was hit by a half hour delay before curtain up, and this may have contributed to the feeling that the show’s 160 minute run-time with interval is a little long. Most of the slack occurs in the Heartbreak Hotel, the den of a counter-culture sect whose members have escaped from the mind control of the Killer Queen’s Globalsoft corporation (Radio Gaga) and yearn for the return of rock music, if only they could find out what that actually was. The hero Galileo (Ian McIntosh) and heroine Scaramouche (Elena Skye) both have outstanding voices, which are heard at their best in the touching duet Who Wants To Live Forever. I doubted however whether the show really needed the lesser-known Brian May songs Hammer to Fall and Headlong. Michael McKell’s menacing humour as Cliff comes as a welcome relief. Together Galileo and Scaramouche bring the show to an exhilarating musical climax with We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions, and the live rock musicans take to the stage for a well-deserved bow before playing, as an encore, the indispensable Bohemian Rhapsody.

Ben Elton’s amiably tongue-in-cheek script sends up the whole genre of juke box musical with an utterly improbable plot and innumerable allusions to other artists, from the Beatles to Benny Hill. Under Elton’s direction the whole production has a knowingly magpie quality, borrowing the opening sequence of Star Wars, and including a pantomime villain, Khashoggi (a character who is probably overdue a new name on grounds of taste) apparently styled on the late Karl Lagerfeld. The production reportedly changes up its jokes, its references and the names of minor characters on a regular basis in order to stay funny and feel less dated; there are a couple of good Covid gags. It’s a tribute to the show’s influence and impact that other juke box musicals have borrowed freely from it in their turn: especially Bat Out Of Hell, whose plot also hinges (although without irony or spoof) around a counter-culture sect with an underground den, and a ride on a Harley Davidson. Anyone unfamiliar with the music of Queen would be baffled by We Will Rock You, but for the band’s legion of fans it remains a delight.

New Wimbledon Theatre, until 4 June

Image: Johan Persson

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