' It’s time to get ready to rock' Sundial Theatre Cirencester College We Will Rock You

The Cirencester College production of Queen and Ben Elton’s smash hit musical We Will Rock You was high octane, intense, noisy and with amazing visual effects. It was an ambitious project for students and particularly for first time director/producer and designer Andy Webb but they pulled it off in fine style. The storyline is that on Planet Mall in 2303 all musical instruments are banned. It’s an age of boybands and girlbands where hits are scheduled in advance and produced by computers. But resistance is growing because underneath the city live the bohemian rebels who believe that there was once a golden age when kids formed their own bands and wrote their own songs. Can they bring back the old Rock ‘n Roll spirit? Well, of course they can and do, though it’s a pretty bumpy road they travel before hero and heroine Galileo and Scaramouche , aided by Pop, Britney Spears, Meat and Bigg Macca get the better of the Killer Queen and her nasty henchman Commander Khashoggi and finish off the performance with We are The Champions and We Will Rock You. All the actor/singers played their parts with enormous veuve, especially Iwan Lewis as Galileo, Lucy Bennett as Scaramouche, Waylon Holloway as Khasoggi and Samantha Millard (Meat) who has a particularly haunting voice. We Will Rock You was especially appealing to the young and to those who grew up in the 1980s but also to oldies who remember the very first Rock ‘n Roll of the 1950s and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, to which Planet Mall bore a scary resemblance. It was a triumph for Andy and his team and it was a lot of fun.

Di Alexander, Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard
Thursday 26th April 2007.