But hey, a couple of thousand screaming Queen fans a night (after a slow start, ticket sales picked up following the cast’s promotional efforts at the real Queen’s Jubilee celebrations) suggest that the producers of We Will Rock You at the Dominion Theatre (the Queen back catalogue in the style of Stars in their Eyes, with Nigel Planer reviving his own old Young Ones role as an ageing hippy) know more than I do, though one suspects that the show will have to continue that success for some time to make its investment back (fit-ups measured in months rather than weeks do not come cheap).
Some of the money is visible on stage (particularly the tracking-and-flying LED video walls from Lighthouse, fed by Blitz’s new HRS graphics system, and run via Brilliant Stages’ motion control and Vertigo’s rigging, which re-arrange themselves into many different patterns during the show) and some if your eye wanders over to the technical infrastructure (let’s just say that the circle front conductor monitors appear to be plasma screens).
The show tells the story of a far-off future where the world is run by a global software company and rock music is banned. The saviours of the world are, of course, Queen, whose hidden messages lead the hero of the piece to the last electric guitar on Earth, hidden in a derelict Wembley Stadium (OK, so maybe it’s not that far into the future). It’s a trite story in the familiar, comfortable style of its author, Ben Elton, and some high-powered creativity has been enlisted to help tell it in style: designers Mark Fisher and Willie Williams, costume designer Tim Goodchild and sound designer Bobby Aitken, an interesting collective of rock and roll and theatre backgrounds whose work was marshalled by design assistant Piers Shepperd and production manager Ted Irwin.
The result is therefore, perhaps unsurprisingly, something of a mixture of rock and roll and theatre styles. Fisher and Williams have collaborated to create an environment that alternates between big physical set pieces (most impressively the derelict Tottenham Court Road tube station platform which rises from the basement (the real gag being that Tottenham Court Road tube station does, in fact, sit below the Dominion’s stage), painted cloths, rock-style moments (a catwalk which swings out over the audience, with one or more performers safely clipped in to its handrails), and virtual scenery constructed using the eight LVP1010C video screens - throttled right back to minimum power but their brightness still threatening to run away with the show’s entire visual domain.
Sometimes these form a dynamic part of the action, with virtual dancers forming a backing group to real ones in the show’s opening number (what will Equity think?); sometimes they bombard with abstract images; sometimes they relay live video, and on one occasion they even form a virtual room with virtual ‘flying ducks’. They score the top visual gag of the evening (when our heroes, heading to Wembley on a flying Harley, pass Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in full flight!). They also allow Queen themselves to make an appearance, with the opening of the Bohemian Rhapsody video forming one of the clues that leads our heroes to that sacred guitar.
For lighting, Willie Williams’ design went through many, many iterations from an early approach involving the ‘traditional’ image of Queen - massed ranks of chrome Par cans - through a variety of concepts and experiments to a final rig intended to give as much
