We Will Rock You
February 5th, 2006
Went to London last weekend for my bro’s 21st little did we know that it was also the Chinese New Year on Sunday so London was even more busier than usual.
We Will Rock You was written by Ben Elton as an excuse to jam onto the stage as many Queen songs as possible–well aren’t the majority of musicals like that? Nevertheless much of the dialogue between the songs was cleverly edited to keep up with the times and can stand quite well by itself. Also the “rock and roll forever man” plot is cleverly counterbalanced by Scaramouche (Hannah Jane Fox) and her deadpan humour.
The singing and the band were very good, though the lead Galileo (Peter Johansson) didn’t even attempt to sing falsetto, which was probably a good thing. Annoyingly there was an American woman sitting next to me who had obviously seen it all before to do all the audience participation bits…before they had even started, so I also got half baked renditions of a lot of the choruses.
It was nearing the end but still no Bohemian Rhapsody, the curtains fell–”Do you want Bohemian Rhapsody?”–the audience went wild. They went wilder still when Brian May came on playing lead guitar. Yes I said Brian May! Check his online diary if you don’t believe me. Unfortunately I didn’t take any photos, but hey, would you want to be the one to put him off Bohemian Rhapsody?
London Aquarium
I did however take some photos of the fishies! If you’re digital, rest the camera on one of the viewing seats and turn the flash off so it exposes properly. Some people blatantly ignored the no flash photography signs, so they’ll get nice exposed shots of flash reflections in the perspex. Unfortunately finding viewing seats was difficult as the aquarium was packed with little children; if I wanted the zoo I’d go to the zoo, I wanted fishies–grrr
I admit that I was expecting a more, but if you’ve never been to an aquarium it’s still enjoyable. For everyone else, the only reason for going there would be to re-enact Closer on an unsuspecting member of the public:
Feel free to call me The Sultan…
February 5th, 2006 at 10:11 pm
If you ever make it to Sydney make sure you check out the Sydney Aquarium. It’s really quite big and allows you to sort of walk through this tunnel of glass under the actual ocean.
Nice photos btw.
February 5th, 2006 at 11:48 pm
London looks so pretty. I wish I could actually get out and explore when I’ve got a layover there. Some day I’ll make it over….
February 5th, 2006 at 11:49 pm
…and as a comment to Pascal, I must second it. The Sydney Aquarium is amazing.
February 6th, 2006 at 2:24 pm
Through a little help of the User Agent switcher Pascal found Nemo! lol (in joke)
We’ve all seen Finding Nemo–right?
Oh, nearly forgot. I bought a bottle of coke in the Dominion Theatre and it was £2.50! That’s like $4.40 USD! Grr…