Review: We Will Rock You - Dalgety Players
Fife amateur theatre group Dalgety Players rocked the foundations of the old Carnegie Hall this week in Dunfermline as they celebrated their 50th anniversary.
The story of the musical began around 1995 with ideas pitched to guitarist Brian May and based on the life of Freddie Mercury.
Robert De Niro’s company was interested but found the ideas difficult to stage and it looked like it would be forgotten.
In 2000 Ben Elton was approached by May and Roger Taylor for ideas based on their music and within a year it was drafted as a script. By May 2002 it had opened in the West End.
This year quite a few companies leased the rights to the show, bringing new challenges and competition to the stage, including the Dalgety Players.
With Kat Bandera as group president and director of the show every aspect of the performance was brought to perfection and helped by her assistant Ellen Callendar. The sound is all important and in their six-piece live band, seen at the top of the stage the experience of these hardened musicians shone through from the opening bars of Innuendo into the hugely familiar Radio Ga Ga.
Led by Musical Director Isobel Brown in the pit along with an additional choir of six vocalists, they stormed the soundtrack right down to the detail for the guitar break in Bohemian Rhapsody deservedly on full spotlight.
The leads were outstanding with complex vocals and lines but captured with ease by 17-year-old Theo Hart as Galileo already a veteran of the performing arts.
Beside him Bethan Laing as Scaramouche in her first show for the company excelled alongside 17-year-old Abbie Reid (Ozzy Osbourne) and Michael Nicol (Britney Spears) in his first role.
Freya Riley was a commanding Killer Queen, showing her already vast experience and a voice that stopped the show. Khashoggi was David Mutch, never breaking character amid the mayhem with support from Emma Parsley as the teacher and Andrew Cunningham as the oddly named ‘Buddy Holly and the Crickets’.
At times there were 75 actors in the space with fast moving characters in the middle aisle as well as both sides of the theatre so great credit to choreographers Sophie Lister and her assistant Jacqui Ritchie from Zodiac School Of Dance for the timing, control and spectacle of the talent we saw.
Subgroups all had their moments too with such an impressive soundtrack such as the eight young Teen Queens, and the Defiant Dancers within an at times crowded stage.
The songs are what means the audience leaves with a smile and some Queen memories though and they would not be disappointed during this short run with I Want To Break Free, A Kind Of Magic, Hammer To Fall, We Are The Champions and of course Bohemian Rhapsody and We Will Rock You.
The spectacle was first class too though as the cast worked hard and looked amazing with principles like rock heroes and ensemble so colourful in matching shirts and outfits.