[RainbowJude]

Cape Town has gone We Will Rock You crazy, with the show opening at the end of last month. I went along and thought I'd formalise my thoughts regarding the show, as well as link to articles as reviews that appear in the local press. Just in case anyone is interested...

The show opened earlier this year in Johannesburg and Cape Town is the second stop on the three-city SA tour of the show, with the final stop being in Durban when the show closes here. The show is performed with a local cast, directed by an imported director, with local MD and so on.

About halfway through the first act, I must admit I was dumbfounded. Why choose to do this show? Granted, the Queen songs are wonderful but the book is a disaster. The dialogue is basically a series of clunky one-liners, some of which raise a mild chuckle but which basically fall flat. I don't think this was a problem of delivery; I think the book is awful. There is no consistency in the story: one thing I found immensely jarring was the fact that, for someone who is trying to suppress and destroy rock music, the Killer Queen sings an awul lot. And the love story is never resolved - all right, there's a poor attempt at a resolution after the curtain calls and at the end of the encore ("Bohemian Rhapsody"). Galileo and Scaramouche share a kiss as they sing, "Nothing really matters to me." A little odd, no?

The band, I thought, handled the music well although the playing wasn't quite as "clean" as I would have liked. My only exposure to the music as arranged for the show is through the live OLCR, in which the togetherness of the musicians seems much better. I'm only so critical because the MD worked on Chicago last year and the musicianship on that show was amazing. Taken on it's own, however, they were actually fine. The sound was really good, well balanced and at decent levels throughout.

The singing, on the whole, was pretty good with some really wonderful moments (the ending of "Sombody to Love" immediately springs to mind; the actress playing Scaramouche did an amazing, jaw-droppping vocal riff). The actor playing Galileo had a powerful voice, but he belted it all a little too much. Acknowledging that it's a difficult score to get through, I would have liked a little more variation. And his falsetto was not great. The Killer Queen was played by a local pop icon, whose energy I found a little forced. It was a bit like watching someone work, rather than being able to just enjoy a performance. But I guess that could almost be expected when you have to support the material instead of having it support you.

Actually, all I could think the whole way through was how the show would be quite interesting as a Dragonball Z style cartoon feature. I don't know why; perhaps the 1-D quality of the visuals would help disguise the 1-D quality of the script?!! And of course all the design elements in the show recall that kind of visual feel... at least for me.

The acting was rather poor throughout, but again the possible choices are limited by the material. There didn't seem to be a solid decision about accents, dialects and so forth. All the place and cultural references were given a local flavour but there were still some pseudo-American accents, pseudo-Brit accents and all kinds of mixes in between. I could not fault the commitment and energy of the performers, who really gave the show their all and were generally solid.

I thought that the costumes were wonderful - great designs - and the lighting was pretty cool with some nice use of shadow, if I have to think back about it. There was only one big technical glitch - the barroom set collided with the Harley in the scene change but it wasn't disasterous.

Now for the reviews and the articles, with notes (sometimes)....

Reviews:

Show that rocks, as promised. Needless to say, I didn't think it was as great as this reviewer did.

We Will Rock You: SURPRISE, an SA critic with the balls to call a spade a spade: This critic is a writer for a local weekly paper, the Mail and Guardian, which is a more analytical publication than some newspapers in its handling of news and so forth and he has a blog that runs alongside his theatre column in the paper. As you can see, this is a preliminary review of the production that, I gather, will be revised and fleshed out for its actual appearance in the press next month.

West End musical riot of rock: Also notes that the show has a poor book.

There was also an interesting review one of our papers, which also offered a rather prescriptive opinion of "what musicals are" and the nature of musical theatre in general. The article basically implied that audiences should not expect more of musicals than We Will Rock You because things like flimsy plots with a few songs thrown in are inherent to the genre and - this bit in particular infuriated me - we have so-called "straight" plays through which we can connect with and examine the more complex issues that we encounter in our human experience. Unfortunately, the article is only available online to subscribers but I will try and get the couple of relevant paragraphs up here for anyone interested in discussing the quote.

Articles:

Great at being very bad.
Cast members find a crazy little thing called love.
Talented duo rocking at Artscape
An actor's life for Murray
Things get technical with Kilbee.

World-class talent on display in Feldman's latest: Now, I'm ambigous about this final article - an interview with the producer. On one hand, I really agree and admire Feldman's stance with regard to South Africans performing in musicals on South African stages:

[RainbowJude]

And the complete Brent Meersman review for We Will Rock You is here. The headline, not displayed here in the blog, was "We Will Irk You". A couple of great little quotes from the review: "Have you gathered this is not Sondheim?" and "If this passes for thinking out of the box, it’s a cereal box."

I must say that on the night I saw the show, Lliam (who play's Galileo) wasn't flat on his sustained notes (well, maybe once, and, if anything, it was his falsetto work that was really grating) but that the idea of forcing applause out of an audience by bringing almost every song to a climax with a sustained note got really tired by midway through Act I.

Later days
David