Has there ever been a show in which the cast has such a good time? Sometimes that can be a bad sign, but in the production of the Queen jukebox musical that has arrived in Edinburgh for Christmas it simply reflects that they have a licence to be as outrageous, as out-front, as big as possible, and they are loving it.
Queen were never a restrained chamber concert themselves. The company here, led by Michael Falzon, a young Australian, with a panache that Freddie Mercury would have approved of, simply let rip. A packed Playhouse loved every gaudy, extravagant, spectacular second of it and so did I.
Say what you like about Ben Elton’s futuristic fantasy (and it was widely rubbished when it first opened in the West End), it gets many great Queen numbers in and has tremendous fun with rock icons of the past, and indeed present, for some work has been done to freshen up the topical references of what is, after all, a seven-year-old show.
They have even given Scaramouche — the female lead — a pair of knickers with a saltire on just to please the local crowd. And who’s to say that Elton’s basic premise, that 300 years hence an avaricious software company will have taken over all music and turned rock’n’roll into a forgotten legend is so far-fetched?
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Scaramouche, played by Sarah French-Ellis, is one of the things that stops the show being an indulgence. Stroppy, difficult and nobody’s fool, she is the one who ends up with the big guitar solo that, in rock’n’roll circles, is about as subversive as you can get.
Good as the young leads are, it is Brenda Edwards who gives the biggest performance as the Killer Queen head of the evil Globesoft corporation that controls all music with its computers. There are some snide remarks in the script about the noxious impact of The X Factor on music, a competition in which Edwards reached the semi-final four years ago. Now she has truly left Simon Cowell and his kind in her dust.
Not every performance will get the bonus of Brian May and Roger Taylor turning up to play live in the final encore of Bohemian Rhapsody as they did here. But I suspect that audiences will have a high old time of it. And that, really, is the point.
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