When I mentioned to a good friend that I was intending to see the ‘Queen’ musical ‘We Will Rock You,’ he told me that I never ceased to amaze him. I don’t know why. Though he and his wife have a more conventional taste in concerts - Mozart, perhaps, or a spot of Bruckner, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t be able to enjoy both pop and classics. I feel sure that Mozart, for instance, would have revelled in Queen’s fantastic creations and wanted to join in. What Bruckner’s attitude would have been I’m not so sure.
Anyway, whatever, we booked for the Wales Millennium Centre and we went despite the show having been panned by the critics for the past ten years. Had dear Freddie Mercury been buried rather than cremated the gyrations of his corpse in the grave might have rendered the search for further sources of renewable energy quite unnecessary. As long as people like me went along to see 'We Will Rock You,' that is.
We went. A big treat. A looked-forward-to occasion at the end of a big week. And I can’t begin to describe how ghastly it was. Well, I suppose I can begin for I have already begun and the proof of the pudding should be in the eating rather than the cliché. But it really was awful.
To anyone tempted by the hype I say spend the ticket money on a bottle of good wine. Buy yourself some Green and Black’s maximum strength organic chocolate and play all your Queen CD’s several times letting your imagination run wild and the tears of joy roll down your cheeks. And donate the surplus you will have saved from the tickets to AIDS research or some other socially useful charity.
So what is wrong with the show? In a word everything that you can possibly think of: the music was wrong, the volume was wrong, the set designs were wrong, the whole approach to the audience was wrong, the story was worse than wrong, the actors were wrong.
But then when you’ve stopped tearing your hair out and thinking that yes, even I, given a freehand, Queen’s music and the back of a fag-packet, could have created a better show than that, comes the awful thought, the perilous, tragic, worrisome thought that maybe, just possibly, it is I (and the critics) that are wrong - or, even worse, just old. And square and the sort of people who shouldn’t be allowed access to Queen’s music at all because it might excite them too much before their bedtime cocoa.
But banish this dreadful thought. No! No, young people! And no, Ben Elton, and the stagers of last night’s performance who I won’t embarrass by naming: no, no, no! How can you possibly so traduce the fine art of putting on a show? How can the world of popular musical theatre have possibly descended (despite its already long decline) from the wit and elegance and cadences and extravagance and charm and acting and sheer vocal skill to this: sheer brute force and cacophony and a story line that would disgrace the Beano, with absolutely no relation to the music whatsoever.
Cacophony - brute noise and ignorance - that is what it was. Never have I been so deafened. Six bars into the opening number and I was tearing the corner off an envelope to put into my mouth and chew to a maché with which to make a species of ear-plug. My other ear I plugged with my finger, taking it out when people appeared to be talking. Even with these barriers the sound was deafening. It echoed out in physical waves way beyond those levels which, in a factory, would have the Health and Safety inspectors reaching for their prosecution pads.
When the posters said ‘We Will Rock You,’ we didn’t think they meant it literally. The heavy bass grabbed the theatre and worried it like dog with a rag doll. The place will collapse if they run many more shows like that. The Cardiff earthquake of 1990 shook us less.
Apart from posing a serious long term risk to one’s hearing ability, sound at that level isn’t true. You can’t hear music at that super-volume however sophisticated the amplification. The brain shuts down. All you can hear is super-noise, with the singers screeching distorted against it.
If we ask ourselves why Queen were so great, why Freddie Mercury was such a great artist and why their live performances were so loved - the answer would surely have been because they reached out, they touched, they involved the audience, they drew you in. Last night we might have been watching a film. Protected by this wall of sound the cast stamped and shouted and screeched their way through their lines, all subtlety gone, all humour gone, all wit gone and the only possible scintilla of substance remaining, some fair to middling dancing.
We left at the interval.
The picture at the top courtesy of Wikipedia is of Queen performing on stage in 1984.
