KEY POINTS:
Bunk, bunk, bish, bunk, bunk, bish. No, it's not the thunking beat of Queen's We Will Rock You but Ben Elton hitting you over the head with his luddite prejudices.
Elton's got an axe to grind and unfortunately it's not one of Brian May's Red Specials.
Set in
2350, We Will Rock You is Elton's vision of the globalisation end game. Live music is banned and the Globalsoft Corporation controls everyone's thoughts. So corporate greed, malls, junk food, global warming, the internet and any music made after the 70s are bad.
It's fairly shallow sloganeering, obviously designed to appeal to a nostalgic Baby Boomer audience hungry for their younger days, but it grated over the two-and-a-half-hour show.
To give Elton his due, the celebrity send-ups in the script are funny and he has cleverly weaved the Queen hits into the storyline.
And anyway, no one goes to big, cheesy musicals to think - it's all about the spectacle and the songs.
We Will Rock You delivers plenty for Queen fans. There are 24 tunes including Bohemian Rhapsody, We Are The Champions, Radio Ga Ga, Another One Bites The Dust, Under Pressure and I Want to Break Free.
On the spectacle front the show ticks the big musical boxes thanks to Richard Pacholski's energetic lighting design and Mark Fisher's set of many parts, with its giant video screen and real cars and motorbike.
But the greatest special effect of all is Annie Crummer playing the aptly named Killer Queen. Camp and diva delicious, she is in strong voice and obviously enjoying playing to a home crowd. Her costumes make her look like Tina Turner in the Mad Max movies but even then she works it. To use Freddie Mercury's words, she's dynamite with a laser beam.
Leading man Mig Ayesa, of INXS reality show fame, wisely puts his own spin on the songs rather than trying to sound like Freddie.
Also enjoyable are Talia Kodesh as the feisty rock chick Scaramouche, Neels Clasen as henchman Khashoggi and Malcolm Terrey playing humorous Hippie Pop. They and Stephen John Van Niekerk (Brit) and Carly Graeme (Oz) all display fine comic timing and vocal chops.
The chorus sound good but their dance moves were clunky and not as impressive as those of Saturday Night Fever and Dirty Dancing - similar big-budget musicals recently in Auckland.
The grunty live band of seven players is turned up chest-thumping loud, which is great for rock fans, but at times all the singers save Annie seem overpowered despite wearing head mics - surely, a job for the engineers to address in future shows so that the volume remains along with the vocals.
It's kind of interesting to speculate what Freddie Mercury would have made of his greatest hits being turned into neutered family entertainment.
Perhaps he would take comfort in the fact that it takes a cast of 29 to sing Queen's songs with the same power he did alone.
We Will Rock You is a guilty pleasure of the highest order, especially if you can turn off that cynical part of your brain that questions some of the show's pompous musings on the nature of real rock.
After all isn't it just a tiny bit hypocritical for a corporate-sponsored tribute show to take pot shots at American Idol?
And while I'm going against the flow, could we please have Crummer sing Bohemian Rhapsody next time?
