The music of Queen looks to rock Toronto theater scene this summer

TORONTO – For more than 10 years, the Pantages, a restored movie and vaudeville house on a shabby block of Yonge Street, was home to “The Phantom of the Opera,” the wildly popular Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.\nNow, nearly eight years later, the theater, corporately rechristened the Canon, is occupied by another British import, “We Will Rock You,” which uses songs of that iconic 1970s and ’80s rock band Queen. And while no one is suggesting this futuristic comic strip of a musical will last as long as “Phantom,” its producer and creative team undoubtedly would like to see a successful Toronto run.\n“We have to look to audiences to tell us whether we can have that,” says producer David Mirvish. “The way things are going, we have every hope that that will happen. The chances are we are going to be the home of rock for the summer.”\nIt could be boon for Mirvish and, in general, commercial Toronto theater, which has faltered in recent years, unable to attract long runs like it did in the days of “Phantom,” “Mamma Mia!” and “The Lion King.” Those runs were fueled, in part, by American audiences, who, since Sept. 11 and SARS, have not been as plentiful. One question mark will be if the rising Canadian dollar and more stringent American passport requirements affect cross-border travel.\n“We Will Rock You,” which opened here April 10, premiered in England in May 2002 and is still running there despite what its British director and book writer Ben Elton laughingly says “were possibly the worst reviews in the history of London theater.”\nSome Toronto critics sniffed, too, but the notices were not as scathing as those in England and a few were practically favorable. The Globe and Mail, a national daily, gave the musical three stars out of four. And most of the reviewers cheered the show’s music – the work of all four of the band’s members: singer Freddie Mercury, who died of AIDS in 1991; guitarist Brian May; drummer Roger Taylor and bass player John Deacon.\nIndividually and together, all four members of Queen wrote hits: Mercury, for example, creating “Bohemian Rhapsody,” Deacon writing “Another One Bites the Dust,” Taylor “A Kind of Magic” and May, the well-known anthem “We Will Rock You.” But how do you put them into a musical?\nIt was producer Phil McIntyre who had the idea for a musical, one based on Mercury’s life, but the notion never went anywhere. McIntyre asked Elton to get involved but he was busy with Lloyd Webber writing a musical called “The Beautiful Game.”\nIt was only later that Elton reconsidered, but he rejected the biographical idea. “I wanted something that would reflect the spirit of Queen. And if you think of one word in Britain to reflect Queen it’s `legend,’” the man says. “We like our legendary rock, and the moment you think legend, you think suddenly Arthur ... King Arthur ... the Sword in the Stone and I’m thinking what about an ax in the stone? What about a mighty guitar buried in rock and he who can draw it forth and play the mighty riff? All kinds of heavy-metal silliness.”\nAt the same time, Elton had seen the movie “The Matrix,” and he reveled in its fantasies about people “abused by a vast brain that’s kind of running the planet and nobody knows it.”\n“So I imagined a ‘Matrix’ world where, yes, the machine controls everything, but only in an effort to constantly force it to consume more entertainment and pay for it and download more and more of it.”\nIn this world, 300 years in the future, musical instruments are banned and the kids are only allowed to purchase computerized, digitalized pop music – until a young rebel, an outsider who frees them from their musical bondage to the aptly named Killer Queen.\n“It suddenly struck me that you could combine King Arthur with all the usual future fantasies from ‘1984’ to ‘The Matrix’ and you would have a Queen musical,” Elton says.\nThat includes have an outcast as its young hero, called Galileo, just like in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” who hooks up with a feisty young woman named Scaramouche.\n“We Will Rock You” may be a British musical, but the Toronto production has a unique Canadian flavor, an attempt to localize the show, something which was done for all the other productions including Germany, Switzerland, Japan and an American version in Las Vegas in 2004.\n“We cast it right across the country ... (finding) people from Vancouver Island all the way to Newfoundland,” Mirvish says.