Some bad news for those fed up with recent speculation over artificial intelligence’s future takeover of planet Earth: the return of this 2002 musical, turbo-powered by Queen’s rock anthems and under-powered by Ben Elton’s book, dramatises the same moral panic.
Earth has been conquered and renamed iPlanet. Only a group of badly dressed rock’n’rollers called the Bohemians can save it from the clutches of Killer Queen (Loose Woman Brenda Edwards) – boo – and Khashoggi (Lee Mead) – hiss.
They are the baddies in this futuristic panto – there really is an urge to boo and hiss at them. The goodies come in the shape of odd couple Scaramouche (Elena Skye), who hopes people won’t mistake her name for “scary bush”, and Galileo Figaro (Ian McIntosh), who has a wobbly Long Island accent and an uncertain look: he might be a 1980s rocker but may just as easily have stepped out of Happy Days.
They plod through a threadbare plot with bursts of spurious song, with leading dialogue such as: “Are you ready to break free?” (cue music). We are grateful for the singing though because the Queen songs – from A Kind of Magic to Don’t Stop Me Now – are effectively sung on the whole.
Elton, directing, also makes his stage acting debut as the Rebel Leader, an old hippy previously known as Pop and played by Nigel Planer, and seems as if he has wandered into a musical to perform his standup material. The riff on iPlanet’s “dark digital age” sounds like a luddite’s whinge about a past more wholesome than the present. The Bohemians hark back to the Beatles and Elvis, who they take great delight in calling Pelvis – a standard example of the show’s humour. Whatever the probability of our robot future, Elton’s book is cheesy enough to make a bot’s toes curl. The set combines the aesthetics of an arcade game with a Kraftwerk concert.
It is still plain to see why the show endured for its original 12-year run at the Dominion: the songs transcend their context and keep their rousing, big stadium sound. It is moving when Brian May appears on stage to play his guitar to Bohemian Rhapsody at the end, too, but the journey here has been quite a trudge.
In a preamble, Elton’s Rebel Leader talks of less than flattering reviews of the original production. In this critic’s view, it’s a case of going back to that future for iPlanet’s shaggy bohemians.
At the London Coliseum, until 27 August
