We Will Rock You review: ‘The Queen jukebox musical is blissfully, knowingly bonkers’

As jukebox musicals go, We Will Rock You is so ridiculous it makes Mamma Mia! seem like Shakespeare. But if you leave your brain at the bag check and surrender to the complete and utter silliness of it all, you’re guaranteed a good time. You also get two-plus hours of incredible Queen songs belted out at full volume, even if they’re shoehorned into the most contrived of plots.

Back in 2002, writer Ben Elton came up with a crackpot storyline that had critics crying into their notebooks. Some 300 years in the future, earth has been taken over by the evil Globalsoft Corporation and kids attend the GAGA High School, where they’re taught to blandly conform to universal ideals, wear the same clothes, and listen to the same computer-made music.

Rock-and-roll is banned and musical instruments are forbidden. But young Galileo Figaro (so named in one of many tenuous links to Queen’s lyrics) is a rebel with a cause. Along with a girl he names Scaramouche, he rails against the system and discovers a Bohemian underground that helps him in his quest to bring real music back to a planet that’s starved of original thought and freedom of expression.

Sounds bonkers, right? And it is but blissfully, knowingly so. Elton’s script was clearly written with his tongue so firmly in his cheek he must have punched a hole through it.

There’s a Killer Queen, played by Brenda Edwards with full-throttle vocals. There’s a baddie police commander named Khashoggi, played by Lee Mead with villainous relish, and there’s also a guy named Britney Spears and a girl called Meat Loaf because, well why not? And this time round Elton casts himself as the long-haired rebel leader Pop, an ageing rocker who – in an updated opening monologue – gets to comically rant against processed music, social media, and our addiction to screens.

The script has also been updated to include nods to Harry Styles and Taylor Swift but We Will Rock You is a show set in the future that has one foot in the present and the other in the early 2000s, when it premiered at the Dominion Theatre and people still called each other tosspots and knobs.

The choreography is terrible and the revival misses a trick by referencing gender and sexual fluidity whilst featuring a seemingly gender-rigid ensemble and a heteronormative couple. That said, Ian McIntosh is androgynously appealing as the jittery Galileo (like a young Jake Shears having a permanent kiki) and Elena Skye is a spunky Scaramouche, even if the band keeps drowning her out.

Brenda Edwards suffers no such fate as she tears into ‘Fat Bottommed Girls’ or ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’. And Brian May’s surprise appearance on opening night, rising through the stage for a rip-roaring ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ guitar solo, proves the show has the Queen seal of approval.

I can’t in all conscience award it more than three stars but it’s a critic-proof phenomenon that could well be still running in 300 years’ time.

We Will Rock You is at the London Coliseum until 27 August. Get tickets here.