Quotes of the Day

I'm back from a four-day, nine-show tour of the London stage, and no, to answer your immediate question, I did not see Madonna, or Gwyneth. (The once Material, now Imperial Girl is playing an art dealer in David Williamson's Aussie "Up for Grabs," and Paltrow has the lead in a West End transfer of the Broadway hit.) I did catch a play, Kenneth Lonergan's "This Is Our Youth," featuring Matt Damon, Ben Affleck's little brother Casey and River/Joaquin/Rain Phoenix's kid sister Summer. I was also in a restaurant that Vanessa Redgrave had just left. Can I trade all of these famous, infamous or kin-famous actors in for Mad and Gwyn?

No? No matter. I still think I had a rich visit. American pop divas and movie hotties may be bringing younger crowds into the West End, but they are not the lure for me. I confess that go to the British theater to see... the Brits! They're good at it. They've been doing it longer. At the very least, the level of mediocrity is much higher there than on the New York stage. At its teeming best, London gives playgoers the chance to share the illuminating careers of great actors — not just Gielgud and Guinness and three generations of Redgraves, but long-time favorites like Julia McKenzie, Penelope Keith, Alan Bates, Felicity Kendal, Frances de la Tour, Michael Gambon, Fiona Shaw, Lindsay Duncan — to hear them speak the language with beauty, wit, power, and to follow their career arcs as they inhabit roles we would never know if we had seen only their film and TV work.

One more thing. In a media age that homogenizes and globalizes, and even with the blurring of lines between West End and Broadway musicals, the English theater stays defiantly English. Those lovely Ealing comedies have vanished from the screen; "Masterpiece Theater" is stooped with age, and the PBS schedule rarely tolerates even the best Britcoms. So Anglophiles like me cross the Atlantic to be reminded of the precious ephemerality of stage acting and the endangered but enduring nature of Englishness (and Welshness and Scottishness), and of the English theater. Oh to be in London, now that spring is here!

So there I was, two weeks ago, bathing in Kendal's tart luminescence as she played a suburban Gertrude to Simon Russell Beale's Hamlet in the blooming, searching comedy "Humble Boy." At the National Theatre, Shaw was in "The Powerbook," directed by her regular co-conspirator Deborah Warner, so again I got to itemize the Irish actress' tics and furies; that was exhilarating. I dozed during Peter Hall's version of "The Bacchai" (also at the National), played by actors in full-face masks. Didn't Hall notice that when a performer's mouth is covered, his speech becomes muffled? That's something of a hindrance when the text is Euripides' complex verbal arias. I also caught Marc Salem's one-man show "Mind Games," in which the New York psych-out intuits a drawing he can't see, a word from a book he hasn't read, a place and an emotion you're thinking of. Is it mentalism? Mesmerism? A great stunt? I can't say, but Salem surely picked the pocket of my skepticism.

Note: for research purposes only, I sat through the new hit musical, "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang," based on the 1968 movie musical. It has a flying car (reminiscent of airborne chandeliers and helicopters of musicals gone by) that, at the matinee I attended with 2,000 mesmerized schoolchildren, actually rose and "flew" out over the first rows of spectators. The show boasts an attractive cast of veterans: Brian ("Cats") Blessed, Nicola ("Poppy") McAuliffe, Edward ("Nicholas Nickleby") Petherbridge and, as the villainous Childcatcher, Richard ("The Rocky Horror Show") O'Brien, who was hissed throughout, including at his curtain call, by the children. They apparently had a spiffing time. I didn't. I found "CCBB" as dull and painful as a long chat with my body-shop mechanic. The songs, by Richard and Robert Sherman ("Mary Poppins"), are wan rewrites of music-hall tropes. Did any of the Sherman brothers' movie music equal the effervescent diversion of their 1960 pop hit "You're Sixteen"?

Pop music was on my mind in London. My official mission — exclusively for TIME.com! — was to see two new shows inspired by British pop groups of the 70s and 80s. "We Will Rock You" is a collection of 30-plus Queen songs cocooned in a futuristic plot. "Taboo" is an intimate memoir-musical with music by Culture Club's decadent decal, Boy George. Both bands created tunes that spoke to its generation even as it bowed to classic pop music. Both were fronted by gay showmen who loved to dress in drag (what Brit entertainer doesn't?). It also happens that the two productions were directed by Christopher Renshaw, best known on this side of the Pond for his mid-90s revival of "The King and I." And of course both hope to cash in on the catalogue-musical trend spearheaded by the multi-continental success of the ABBA musical "Mamma Mia."

IT'S A MIRACLE

Why bury the lede? I say "yay" to "Taboo." I had one of the best theater times I can remember, up there with such stage-rock blasts as the original "Rocky Horror Show" and the off-Broadway "Little Shop of Horrors." A pocket history of the New Romantic club-scene movement of the late 70s and early 80s, "Taboo" manages to treat its colorful characters with tartness and affection. The cast, largely composed of actors who were hardly born when the people they're playing were flourishing and flouting, is terrif, top to bottom. And the 22, mostly ballad-like songs, which Boy George (O'Dowd) wrote with Kevin Frost, Richie Stevens and John Themis, have lilt, snap and instant hummability. Though a four-song CD is available now, I was sorry I couldn't immediately take the whole score home with me in disc form.

Culture Club was a fun group to watch and listen to. Its light, reggae-inflected style produced three hits: "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me," "I'll Tumble 4 Ya" and "Karma Chameleon," a song George got so sick of that for a while he refused to perform it. A garish vision in dark red, black-lined lipstick and matching attitude, George merged the campy but supposedly straight visual voluptuousness of glam rock with the proudly gay club subculture. He then committed a very rock-star-like cliché and became a heroin addict. Since rehabilitated (and, intermittently, reunited with his band mates), George is now a DJ of distinction. Surviving drug addiction and watching so many friends, including Bowery, die of AIDS has given him an Olympian perspective on the New Romantics. "Taboo" is fashion recollected in tranquility.

All the unusual suspects are here: the club organizer Philip Sallon (played by Paul Baker), gender-blender Boy George (Euan Morton), drag-queen pop singer Marilyn (Mark McGee) and performance artist Leigh Bowden (played this time by Boy George himself). But the show's book, by Mark Davies, is clever enough to plant a heterosexual kid in the midst of these gay blades, for easy identification by any heterosexual stragglers into the Venue, the former club (and before that, church crypt) that serves as the "Taboo" theater. Davies also creates a sympathetic, suffering mother figure — an Everymum played Lyn Paul (who more than 30 years ago had a worldwide hit, the Coke jingle "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing," with the New Seekers) — to answer the first question many conservatives have when they see the flamboyant characters who populate the show: What do their mothers think? Well, their mums love them; and "Taboo" loves them right back.

So here's straight-arrow but artistic Billy (Luke Evans), stranded in downtown Bromley. Billy's mum is a caring, pining sort, but his dad wants only his pint and his telly. "I don't waste my time kidding myself that I'm going to mean something," he tells Billy, who replies, "Then you'll never be disappointed." He's gotta get out of this place, so he exiles himself to London. There he quickly meets Boy George, who consoles Billy with his own life story: "My dad wanted me to be a builder. But I wanted to paint and decorate myself." Sizing up Billy with a knowing ogle, he adds, "I could be up for conversion, though."

This bitchy repartée is a tinge redolent of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward, but out of the closet — less cowardly, more wild. And George gets most of the punch lines. Billy: "So you're straight?" George (lewdly): "Straight up you." ... Billy, of the drag queen singer Marilyn: "Isn't she pretty?" George: "Yeah. If you like a pig in a wig." ... Marilyn, of the actress who was her inspiration: "I'm Norma Jean. I was born the year she died." George: "Yeah, she died and left behind an abnormal gene." Later, when George becomes the pop star Boy George, he parries press questions as adroitly as the Beatles used to do. Q.: "Are you homosexual?" B.G.: "Well, I have sex at home." Q.: "Are you bisexual? B.G.: "I'm trisexual. I'll try anything."

George, though, isn't the only character with zinger-ability. Kim (Dianne Pilkington), Billy's sometime girl friend, refers to the Australian Leigh as "a wallaby wannabe," and after a Boy George cruelty, snaps at him, "You might not have a twat, but you certainly know how to behave like one." Philip, the caustic enabler who runs his own salon (or Sallon), is the show's mistress of ceremonies. "I'm known in all the wrong places," he sings, "I'm one of those faces/ You'll never forget." And tout suite, he's dishing the crowd, purring to one man, "I know what would look good on you: me." (Later he cruises the audience for an impromptu five minutes of back-chat. It's sharp stuff: Don Rickles meets Dame Edna.) Even the PA-system voice is snarky; at the interval, it drawls, "Smoking is prohibited in the auditorium, despite the fact that the place is full of fags."

As is true of almost any epic story, this one has its downer moments in Act II when most of those involved must get mean, embarrassed, addicted or deathly ill. Bowery, who made his rep as "art on legs" for painting himself into the most deliciously outré costumes, passes on. And George, after drug treatment, sees a light in the East and takes his lot of battered friends to the bank of the Ganges, where the rapturous chorale "Bow Down Mister" is sung. Even this elevated ending cannot banish frivolity. To chants of "Hare Krishna," the gang adds Harry Secombe (co-star of "The Goon Show" on radio), Harry Ramsden (a chain of fish-and-chips shops) and Hari Kari. But no one is likely to impale himself on a sword at this retro-Romantic party. It's too much bloody fun.

One person, it turns out, couldn't join in. "Taboo" has a passing jape where it twists Madonna's "Vogue" lyric — "Gene Kelly/ Fred Astaire/ Ginger Rogers/ Dance on air" — into "Ginger Rogers/ Fred Astaire/ That Madonna/ Dyes her hair." Well, the lady Ciccone threatened to sue over this bit of frippery, provoking the ever-quotable George to snap, "I used to think she was an icon but she's more eyesore to me now." He added: "It's a shame because the song was funny but she obviously has no sense of humour. Americans don't have that ability to laugh at themselves in the way Brits do." And indeed, laughing at oneself (while mewling on the inside) is the very meat and mode of "Taboo." It even pokes a crimson-nailed finger at itself: in Act II, when George is arrested for drug possession. "I've already got a criminal record," he drawls to the police. "?Karma Chameleon.'"

So why should "Taboo" not thumb its powdered (inside and out) nose at the other new West End musicals? In his trip through the audience the night I attended, Sallon-Baker referred to "CCBB" as "Shitty Shitty Gang Bang," and offered this synopsis of the show: "a car that doesn't work and a bunch of fuckin' kids." And when the Boy George character enters a recording studio, he declares that his producer is about to hear "the best song ever written or performed." A voice from the auditorium promptly groans, "Oh, not 'Bohemian fuckin' Rhapsody' again!?"

LA BOHEME

Last month the Guinness World Records British Hit Singles book released results of a poll in which more than 30,000 people in the U.K. chose their favorite pop tunes. In the top ten were five records by Beatles or former Beatles. ABBA's "Dancing Queen" was fourth, Madonna's "Like a Virgin" fifth. And the winner, by a wide margin, was ... (drum roll, fuzz guitar riff, choir-boy harmonics) ... "Bohemian fuckin' Rhapsody."

But that six-minute "mock opera," as composer-singer Freddie Mercury dubbed it, has other achievements. It is the only song in British pop history to go to No. 1 twice in the same version — on its original release in 1975, and when rereleased after Mercury's death in 1991. In the U.S. it nearly duplicated that feat, reaching #9 the first time around, then #2 in 1992 as a beneficiary of a hit movie: "Wayne's World," with the idiot epiphany when Mike Myers, Dana Carvey and their chums sing along with "Bohemian Rhapsody" on a car radio and bang their heads on the dashboard in innocently orgasmic teen-boy bliss.

So congratulations to the British public for choosing the only song with that includes the words silhouetto, Scaramouche, fandango, Galileo, Figaro, magnifico, Bismillah (honestly, I thought that line was "Miss Miller! We will not let you go!" until the Queen Lyrics website spelled it out: the Arabic word for "In the name of Allah") and Beelzebub ("...has a devil put aside for me"; or is it "hassenpfeffer on a sideboard, me"?). The references here are elusive and allusive enough to spur a doctoral thesis. In the "We Will Rock You" musical, a young person asks an aged savant to explain this mystic meaning of the Beelzebub line. "Actually," he replies, "I think that bit is a pretentious load of old bollocks."

If "Bohemian Rhapsody" (two words not in the song) has a mystic or any other large meaning, I'm too myopic to find it. Like some Beatle numbers on side 2 of "Abbey Road," this one is composed to tantalizing bits: a drifting, floating start ("Any way the wind blows/ Doesn't really matter to me"), two verses on a boy telling his mother he committed a murder ("Pulled my trigger, now he's dead"), then some madly intricate choral work followed by the one hard-rock passage ("So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye/ So you think you can love me and leave me to die") and a final surrender to the opening lassitude ("Nothing really matters to me/ Any way the wind blows"). Instead of coherence, the song seeks emotional anarchy; the moods change convulsively, like the sound track for a troubled mind. But all four or five sections are strong, seductive. The song is its own Greatest Hits medley.

KILLER QUEEN

Queen, of course were no one-hit wonders. They enjoyed a nice little run in America from about 1975 to 1980, but in Europe they were big for a decade; they had more Top 10 singles in Britain than any group except the Beatles. And this doesn't include their two-sided, thematically related hits, like "Bicycle Race" backed by "Fat Bottomed Girls" — the lyrics of each song flicking references to the other. One pair of Queen's Janus hits has lived on, around the world, as a double anthem for fans and hooligans alike: guitarist Brian May's "We Will Rock You" is still played at sports events (the Comiskey Park DJ used that familiar drum-clap line to rally the faithful during this week's Mets-White Sox series); and Mercury's "We Are the Champions," thought to be a gay anthem, has been chanted by millions of boozy homophobes when their team wins a football game or football (soccer) match.

Queen had a large musical vocabulary. The band not only blended pop and hard rock, it ransacked early rock (Chuck Berry's "Little Queenie" in "Now I'm Here"), nursery rhymes ("Rockabye Babe" in "Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy") and music-hall chestnuts ("I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" in "Seven Seas of Rhye"), with vagrant dips into the classical repertory. And I do revere the group's angelic harmonies, those fortissimo falsetto soarings in three or four or a dozen parts (on the recordings, are they all Freddie?). I love the four descending "ohs" at the end of "magnifico" and "will not let you go" in "Bohemian Rhapsody"; the playful eliding "oooohs" in "Killer Queen"; the long, strong, Slavic tonalities that open "Fat-Bottomed Girls" and the more breathless, uphill start of "Bicycle Race." Just try to sing along with these. It's hard; they're complicated.

The harmonic apotheosis comes in "Somebody to Love," set in old-time rock-'n-roll power-ballad triplets, like the Fats Domino song "One Night," memorably recorded by Elvis. "Somebody" is structured as a kind of debate between desperation (Freddie's lead) and precision (the chorus). Freddie screams out his anger, and, an octave higher, the chorus duplicates his words or offers advice. Sometimes they sing with him, sometimes a half-beat ahead or behind, while Freddie trudges valiantly on through his slough of despond. Are the choir members consoling the singer, or lightly jeering at him? Are they perhaps parodying the whole call-and-response style of liturgical and gospel music? Whichever, a tremendous amount of work must have gone into this superproduction. It paid off, though. For here is raw emotion that is at once rendered, magnified, transcended, beatified and burlesqued — in other words, the process and glory of art.

Queen was a pretty cool blend of studio band and slam-glam touring band. One could say that the quartet had the musical ambitions and harmonics of the Beatles and the sexy front man of the Rolling Stones. This would be both to exaggerate the band's achievement (they weren't near the Beatles, though they were great pretenders) and to sell Freddie short. Mercury was a meta-Jagger in his gaudy frocks, his pansexual performance art, the luscious mouth and diagonal overbite made for fellating the concert-stadium mike. The band's chief songwriter for Queen, Freddie was also its face, heart, lungs and loins — his generation's true dancing Queen. "He had everything, in extremis," said Lyricist Tim Rice ("Evita," "The Lion King"). Dave Clark, whose quintet briefly rivaled the Beatles in popularity nearly 40 years ago, called Freddie "the 80s Edith Piaf."

READY, FREDDIE

The singer's life and artifice are naturals for documentary treatment, and he got it in the feature-length, Grammy-nominated "Freddie Mercury: The Untold Story" by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, who also directed some of the band's videos and an earlier documentary, "The Queen Phenomenon." The brisk, comprehensive and ultimately affecting "Untold Story" has loads of telling archive footage, some questionably recreated scenes of the singer's youth and a dozen or so telling interviews (from which the quotes here come). Born Farouk Bulsara, in 1946, to a Parsi family on the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar — his father was an accountant with the British High Court there — he was sent at age 8 to St. Peter's English Boarding School, in Panchgani, in western India. There Farouk formed his first band, the Hectics.

At London's Ealing School of Art, where he showed burgeoning talent as an illustrator and graphic designer, he met May, Taylor and John Deacon, then in a group called Smile. They became Queen, and Freddie their lead vocalist. In an early Queen song, "My Fairy King," Freddie had written the lines: "Mother Mercury, Mercury/ Look what they've done to me." He told his mates that, since he'd written about his mother, he was from now on Freddie Mercury. It allowed a shy boy to turn his latent artistry into blatant theatricality. "The young Bulsara person was still there," Taylor says, "but for the public he was gonna be this different character — this god."

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 Caballé; 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 paté 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.

• Richard Corliss
• Richard Corliss on London shows with the music of Freddie Mercury and Boy George