Sharon Clark (L) as Killer Queen with Alex Hanson in 'We Will Rock You'
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At 15, he had written a Harold Coffin aphorism into a schoolmate's book: "Modern paintings are like women. You'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them." Freddie loved women; perhaps he understood them. His closest friend, former shopgirl Mary Austin, was for a time his wife. In the 80s he was close to the Met soprano Montserrat Caball; they spent one whole night together, singing, and later recorded the "Barcelona" album of duets. (His fans, she says, would ask, "Who is the woman that screams so much with Freddie?") But he was also a gay man — couldn't everyone see this? — with a need to dissemble, to flaunt his effeminate eccentricity even as he publicly denied, until two days before his death, his gayness.
As Queen's popularity grew, so did Freddie's instinct for extravagance, on stage and off. "There was the odd wild moment," a smiling Rice said of Freddie's at-homes, "which I would, I think, have to consult my lawyer before talking about in great detail." Relocating to Munich in the 80s, he threw the odd wild party, like the notorious one for his 39th birthday. "You had to come dressed as your favorite person," says Peter Starker, a friend of Freddie's. "And he just came dressed as himself, obviously." The band's sound engineer, Trip Khalaf, recalls "a dwarf covered in liver. He laid there on a platter...and when anybody dug this dull knife into him...the whole plate of liver would quiver. So it was like a moving pat pastiche!" Khalaf is not easily shocked. "I'm used to seeing my grandmother crawl up my leg with a knife in her teeth." Still, he describes the bacchanal as "pretty much Wretched Excess. That was the worst thing I've ever been to. I'll probably go to hell because of that."
Beelzebub had a devil put aside for Freddie too: AIDS, which he probably contracted when he spent time in New York in the early 80s. Mercury spent his last decade with Jim Hutton, whom he called "my husband." He loved Hutton as "someone to come home to." Like the speaker at the end of "Bohemian Rhapsody," Freddie had spent all his venom, all his passion. "I've stopped having sex," he told a reporter, "and started growing tulips." Toward the end, his costume designer Diana Moseley visited him; they played Scrabble, and as she was leaving he said, "Thank you for spending the afternoon with an old man." At his death, on November 24, 1991, he was 45.
The group died when Freddie did — though the three survivors joined other alterkocker rockers to entertain their sullen monarch at last week's Queen's Jubilee, and two of them are connected with the musical "We Will Rock You."
WE WILL ROCK YOU
In the lobby of the Dominion Theatre, attendants sell popcorn. Inside, the audience is a clapping, bouncing bunch — the parents and older sibs of the kids at "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," determined to have a good time. The young women behind me sing along with every lyric, then chat at peak volume through the dialogue scenes. The two women next to me, a little suspicious that I'm taking notes, ask with hope and concern if I'm having a good time.
The writer is Ben Elton, who with Richard Curtis wrote most of the "Blackadder" TV series, and recently collaborated with Andrew Lloyd Webber on "The Beautiful Game," a musical set amid the Irish Troubles. "We Will Rock You" oddly mixes Elson's two moods: it's a solemn satire, with only a few, left-field jokes, most involving faux-ignorant references to old rock songs. The best joke is also the most irrelevant one: a resident of the show's bleak future world announces, "We have to drain the lakes to fill the Coke dispensers"; when someone scoffs at that, the resident retorts, "Oh, have you seen the size of cups? 'Regular' is the size of a dustbin."
Elson posits a bleak, mechanized future for society and its prime artistic expression, rock 'n roll. First, ugly people are banned from the charts, then all humans, then all rock. By the 24th century, Earth is called Planet Mall, and it is run by GlobalSoft Corporation (Global Soft-core for short). The students at Virtual High scorn our hero Galileo (strong-voiced, appealing Tony Vincent) and our heroine Scaramouche (Hannah Jane Fox). He's a seer — or, rather, a hearer, with forbidden snatches of 20th century rock songs haunting his dreams — and she's sort of post-punk; of her snotty classmates, she says, "They think I'm a lesbian because I don't wear pastels." But the people in charge know that somewhere on Planet Mall stirs the spirit of politico-musical insurgency, with its own delphic vocabulary. "What," one of the overlords wonders nervously, "does 'a wop bop a loo lop, a wop bam boom' mean?"
Eluding the Big Brother clutches of Khashoggi (Alexander Hanson) and the predatory Killer Queen (Sharon D Clarke), Galileo and Scaramouche discover a cadre of revolutionaries in the Tottenham Court Road tube station (which is just under the theater). These rebels without a clue — they're known as, hmmm, Bohemians — have taken their noms de guerre from labels on scraps of old vinyl they've found. They call themselves Madonna, Meat, Cliff, Prince, Aretha; the toughest black guy is named Britney Spears (a gag that leads, after more pop entanglements in Act II, to the indelibly elegiac line, "Britney Spears died to save us"). They wander about reciting verses from some lost Holy Book they do not understand: "Can you hear the drums, Fernando?" ... "I am the dancing queen." ... "Will the Real Slim Shady please stand up?" The rock bible needs an exegete and gets one in the person of old Pop (Nigel Planer), who natters through much of Act II.
"We Will Rock You," co-financed by Robert De Niro's Tribeca Productions, is a challenge — and, when they get it right — triumph of stage technique. The show means to replicate the gaudier rock concerts of the Queen Era. It's got elaborate lighting rigs, dozens of video screens cued to song lyrics and a huge platform, in the shape of a tongue depressor, that rises, revolves and comes out slightly into the audience. (Or, at some performances, doesn't; the night I was there, Hanson jokingly referred to previous mishaps as he carefully jumped on and literally fastened his seat belt.) No wonder the May 14th press night was preceded by many cancelled preview matinees.
So how is "We Will Rock You"? Depends on what you're looking for. You want Queen songs? This show has about 30 of them — though, bizarrely, the Guinness Book #1 song, with its many dramatic hooks and narrative cues, is not performed in full until the curtain call. You want them well sung? They are, mostly. You want dance? There's lots of it (Arlene Phillips, of Lloyd Webber's roller-derby musical "Starlight Express," did the choreography), though in that strangely clumsy fashion that defines too many West End musicals. May and Taylor have chosen the nine-piece band with care, assuring that the sound in the theater is nearly the sound in the studio or concert hall — amped-up but still clear. This isn't "Mamma Mia," with an inferior sound system and little professional pride in the product. The "We Will Rock You" team has higher ambitions, or pretensions. Renshaw, his touch so light in "Taboo," is heavy-metal here. And the script's got too many sci-fi, hi-fi meanderings.
That said, I had a pretty good time. The show is smart, handsome, vigorous; it will rock you. Yet its emotional high point has nothing to do with all the energy expended by the cast. It comes when a snip of the "Bohemian Rhapsody" video, suitably scratched and tattered, is shown on a large screen. With a glimpse of those four dark, gauzily photographed seraphs, the audience is reminded of what's missing here: the snap and jizz of a Queen performance, back when Freddie was up front, prancing and parading like the god Mercury.
But Freddie's dead.