We Will Rock You Rocks The Boston Opera House

Quinn Banford ’15 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

We Will Rock You is now at the Boston Opera House and if you are a fan of Queen and enjoy their hits, then this is a show that you should see.

The story starts off as an intriguing one; the Killer Queen (Jacqueline B. Arnold) rules over a world composed of a homogenous social media culture and, (of course!), two meddling young rebels threaten to be different. With a rendition of “I Want To Break Free”, the audience is swept into the angst driven mind of Galileo Figaro (Brian Justin Crum). The female lead, Scaramoushe (Ruby Lewis), is ambitious to escape the media-centric world as well. “Somebody To Love” acts as her anthem to attain these dreams. The binding of these two directionless and innocent rebels pushes through the majority of the show’s story.

Galileo was too much of the Cry Baby/James Dean/Harmless Bad Boy image. It just doesn’t make sense for Queen’s sense of hard rock to be represented by the cutesy love drama that ensues throughout the musical, and this can be entirely blamed upon the character of Galileo. This is not to say that his performance was lacking talent or drive; he is a phenomenal singer and performer. This is just to say that Galileo is more in line with a teeny bop romance and not the Rock and Roll badassery that is the Hard Rock Café group.

The pun-comedy and resistance to “the man” made the Hard Rock Café segments the most enjoyable by far. “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” stole the show before intermission. It was the burst of vitality that the show needed following “No-One But You”, the memorial song in honor of Freddie Mercury. Together these two songs provided the Hard Rock Café characters with passionate qualities that were absent in the Killer Queen and her minion, Khashoggi (P.J. Griffith).

It is not fair to judge the overall quality of the musical as a result of the occasionally flimsy and clichéd plot. The performances of Queen’s individual songs were spectacular and visually pleasing. “Seven Seas of Rhye” is by far the best example of the show’s capability to combine the visual with the audible. The song resurrects the spine-tingling sensation felt in “Somebody To Love”. “We Will Rock You” and its sister song “We Are The Champions”, the finale that the audience had been eagerly anticipating, distracted those feelings toward the plot and allowed the music to overtake the Boston Opera House. We Will Rock You knew that Queen’s music would deliver what its patrons came out to see.

Get your tickets to this musically studded performance before the show advances onto the next city.

Get tickets at: http://boston.broadway.com/tickets/show/6868

Show runs now until November 10.