On Tuesday night, my company treated us all to tickets to We Will Rock You, the musical based on the music of Queen. Now, I know as much Queen as the next person (We Will Rock You, We Are the Champions, etc.) but I'd never owned an album. Since the show, I've been constantly on YouTube and Wikipedia watching videos and reading about Freddie Mercury.
This may be one of those things that everyone knows except for me, but did you know that Freddie Mercury is actually Indian (Parsi, specifically, which I thought was such a coincidence since I just went to a Parsi restaurant for the first time yesterday) and didn't move to England until he was 17? His real name is Farrokh Bulsara. He'd been quite secretive about his ethnicity during most of his career. I watched a sequence of YouTube videos about his life and he looked so Indian as a child, but even now that I know, I can't see it in him later on. I'm amazed that he was able to assume a new (white) ethnicity simply by not talking about his origins. When I think back to my sister and I being 2 of only about 6 Asian students in a high school of over a thousand in Nova Scotia, I know that if I had the chance to do that, I would have. Not now, of course.
The leading actor in the We Will Rock You musical, Yvan Pedneault, is French Canadian with a definite Quebecois accent, which makes him a very interesting choice for the role. I thought he was incredibly charming and an amazing singer. If you are a Queen fan, you're going to love this show. No lighters allowed, however, for the slow numbers. They sell glowsticks for $2 a piece for that reason, but be sure not to snap it in too many places (it'll leak glowy fluid on you -- ahem, lesson learned). The storyline is quite lame, but it's really just segue between the songs, which are definitely worth the price of admission. I got chills.
The show runs until January 28. 2008. You should go. You can buy tickets online here (I know I sound like I'm being paid to plug the show, but I'm really not).
1 comment:
This show had the same effect on me. Since I saw it for the first time in Sept. 07 (I've been 8 times since), I have been constantly researching Queen and especially the life of the late Freddie Mercury. I have even acquired rare, out of print books about his life and can not wait to read them!
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