We Will, We Will Rock You!

Every year, our associate artistic director Chris Moore upends my plans for the following season. And each time he does it, the season ends up stronger. Last year around this time, he called me and said, "I know this is probably not your kind of show, but what about doing We Will Rock You?"

Chris didn't know that a couple years earlier I had watched a bootleg of the London production, and I was totally charmed and seduced by it. It reminded me a lot of Bat Boy, Urinetown, Rocky Horror, Head Over Heels, some of my all-time favorite shows. It's very funny, even silly sometimes, and there's an inspired running joke about the huge gap between what the characters know and what the audience knows. (That same device is used a lot in Something Rotten!) And yet the plot of We Will Rock You is deadly serious, and the stakes are literally life-and-death.

The show faithfully follows the structure of the Hero Myth, and bookwriter Ben Elton adroitly uses the Queen songs in service of story and character. Queen wrote some beautiful ballads, but a lot of their songs were very ironic, very tongue-in-cheek, even their majestic "Arena Rock" songs. The ironic tone of the show is a perfect match for the playful, self-aware eclecticism of Queen's catalog.

So I had already fallen in love with this show when Chris mentioned it.

We put it in the season, with Chris as lead director. And holy shit, it is truly a New Line show! This rock and roll fable is about a world in which humanity has been drained from music -- by removing the humans from the creation process. This musical is twenty-four years old, but its plot centers on one of the biggest debates in our society today!

Though the show never uses the term "AI," that's the story. Along the way, Galileo Figaro bumps up against the forces of corporatism, consumerism, pop culture, new technologies, and the  impacts from all of those sources on art and artists.

Part of the goofy/powerful fun of We Will Rock You is that we in the audience don't notice that we're watching a Christ story. Our hero Galileo Figaro is very much a Christ figure and he carries a divine "spark" of sacred knowledge. He carries with him music, which is how we humans best communicate emotionally. Scaramouche is Mary Magdalene, Khashoggi is Pontius Pilate, and the Killer Queen is King Herod.

And of course the Bohemians are the disciples, who will carry this special knowledge to the world -- and who will found a new religion based on Queen's songs, with Freddie Mercury as their most excellent deity!

How great would that be?

We Will Rock You tells us a story of individuals and communities standing up to corporate-governmental oppression. It's about this exact moment in America, when tens of thousands of people are standing up and taking to the streets, in protest of an authoritarian government. Suddenly, "We Are the Champions" and "We Will Rock You" both take on new, loaded meaning. And in these culturally toxic times, "Somebody to Love" is more resonant than ever.

The dystopian world of WWRY is very strange and yet we recognize it. That's what good theatre does. I watched the show last night, finally with all the various elements in place -- lighting, costumes, props, sound, band -- and I had a blast! It's such a fun, goofy, beautiful ride, and our actors are having so much fun with these extraordinary songs. Some pop songs don't transfer to the stage well, but Queen's songs are theatrical and dramatic and ironic by design, so they transfer quite effectively into a narrative.

We Will Rock You is a worldwide monster hit, seen by more than twenty million people in twenty-eight countries on six continents. But it's hardly ever produced in the U.S. I think it's one of those shows that is frequently underappreciated, even by the people working on it. 

It's not a piece of fluff. It's not a guilty pleasure. It's a rock fable about our world today in 2026, about the loss of humanity and empathy that seems to be only accelerating. It's about how we need a hero, and how a hero needs a community -- "No one acts alone. Careful, no one is alone." Galileo Figaro can only achieve his divine rock and roll purpose with the help of the Bohemians.

I'm reminded of a Barry Manilow song, Yes, I'm that old.

Just one voice,
Singing in the darkness;
All it takes is one voice,
Singing so they hear what's on your mind,
And when you look around you'll find
There's more than one voice,
Singing in the darkness;
Joining with your one voice,
Each and every note another octave,
Hands are joined and fears unlocked if
Only one voice
Would start it on it's own;
We need just one voice
Facing the unknown;

And then that one voice
Would never be alone.

I love that lyric. It describes the story of We Will Rock You. It's a metaphor for the politics of our times, and it's also a metaphor for producing a musical.

AI doesn't worry me. It's just another tool. It'll be a loooooong time before humans find something to replace sitting in a darkened theatre with an expectant audience, and watching live actors, actually in the room with us, breathing the same air, telling us a great story. You can't stream the magic of live theatre. Thank Zeus!

I'm telling ya, kids, the best 4K is live theatre.

Theatre has lasted for thousands of years, through every cultural upheaval and technological advancement, through war and Depression, and it's still here. I'm sure we'll be okay for a few thousand more years at least, even if the Killer Queen and Khashoggi try to thwart us. We're storytellers. Humans don't survive without stories, and they don't survive without us.

Join us for the wild, wonderful ride that is We Will Rock You. Trust me, you need this. "Guaranteed to blow your mind!"

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To get your tickets for We Will Rock You, click here.

P.P.S. To buy your 2026-2027 Season Tickets, click here.

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