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Update: tickets are now available
Still the fifteenth longest-running West End show in history, Ben Elton’s Queen musical ‘We Will Rock You’ was a true London icon. Okay, it received distinctly ‘mixed’ notices, but for 12 years the walloping great statue of Freddie Mercury outside the Dominion Theatre was as much a part of London as any other landmark, while it’s a fundamental truth that Elton’s nonsensical sci-fi plot could largely be tuned out in favour of enjoying a walloping 24 Queen classics.
Anyway, long story short ‘We Will Rock You’ will be returning to the West End to celebrate its twenty-first anniversary. Nominally it’s just playing a limited 12-week run at London’s biggest theatre the Coliseum. But presumably it’ll find some way to stick around if the reception is rapturous enough.
How will it stand up in 2023? Famously, ‘We Will Rock You’ and the critics never exactly saw eye to eye. That’s unlikely to change, but it will probably return looking more like a charming curio than when it was in its brazen pomp: jukebox musicals in which a daft plot is extrapolated from a band’s back catalogue have largely fallen by the wayside in the last decade or two, lending ‘WWRY’ a certain eccentric charm.
The big question is: what has happened to the enormous Freddie Mercury statue, and is it coming back? Well part one is simple: according to the show’s writer-director Elton, Queen drummer Roger Taylor nicked it and put it in his garden. Is it going to be plonked on top of the Coliseum? According to the show’s PR ‘plans are in place for something like that’. Watch this space!
‘We Will Rock You’ is at the London Coliseum, Jun 2-Aug 27 2023. To purchase tickets, click here.
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