We Will Rock You Arena Tour

Kevin Kennedy in the arena tour of We Will Rock You at the Sheffield Motorpoint Arena

No fewer than 25 Queen melodies energise We Will Rock You, Ben Elton, Roger Taylor and Brian May’s 2002 hit show, a version of which is touring Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Eastern Europe, and, more recently, Sheffield’s Motorpoint Arena.

Elton’s idea is terrific, but as contorted as it is ingenious. As a vehicle for the sizzling Queen numbers, he produces a sci-fi pantomime, a fusion of Arabian Nights, Aladdin and Orwellian ‘computer-controlled dystopia’, featuring a young twosome’s quest – set 300 years hence in some music-starved future (dominated by ‘Globalsoft’ corporation) – to retrieve humanity and with it the lost art of rock.

After a limp delay before curtain up, the staging has a creaky start. Neither Brenda Edwards’ forcefully sung but tedious Killer Queen, nor the experienced Sean Kingsley’s torturing, dream-squashing Commander Khashoggi save it with their parodistic machinations.

At three points the quality thrills. The opening proper is danced by a team of gorgeously drilled white-clad, androgynous, ‘cloned’ pirouetters. Each time they appear, they stun, and things look up. The other ensemble dancing looks indifferent, and earlier back-projections distract and detract.

But 40 minutes in, Britney (the electrifying Rolan Bell, a real actor and super vocalist) joins the lead duo: Galileo Figaro (MiG Ayesa – vocally splendid but a pretty unengaging anti-hero), and the perky cockney Scaramouche (Lauren Samuels), who lifts the show every time with her cute ‘Bohemian’ optimism. Bell, with his flexi-shoulders and empathetic persona, brings along Meat (Lucie Jones). At their resulting quartet, Elton’s hobbling story soars.

Biggest delight is the eponymous Pop (Kevin Kennedy), like a sleepy mountain king: epitomising art on the edge of extinction. With Pop and his Harley Davidson yearnings come the genuinely comic lines we are aching for (feeble lowest common denominator  jokes in Act I have an embarrassingly zero effect).

Kennedy’s ‘These are the Days of Our Lives’ sweeps the board: his joyous timing is as wicked a tonic as Kingsley’s long-delayed solo number in Act I, sung with Noel Coward panache and a voice to die for (though his second solo sadly flops).

There’s a climax. By the end we are onto the nail-biting big numbers: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ feels tired, but ‘We Will Rock You’ brings the Motorpoint roof down, and justly so.

Credit also goes to Pablo Navarro’s eight-strong band. ‘Ogre Battle’ is a welter of brilliant guitar playing. ‘Hammer to Fall’ is stupendous.

Meanwhile, the We Will Rock You musical creators have been in New York with co-producer Robert de Niro to cast the North American touring version (opening in October in Baltimore) and the London production has recently celebrated its 11th unbroken year.

Roderic Dunnett