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We Will Rock You
Directed and written by Ben Elton
in collaboration with Brian May
and Roger Taylor
Starring Yvan Pedneault and Erica Peck
At the Canon Theatre in Toronto
Rating: ***

Someone ought to call inspectors to check the foundations of Toronto's Canon Theatre.

We Will Rock You, the satirical, anthemic musical based on the hits of the 1970s-80s British band Queen, opened there Wednesday night and it's entirely possible the venerable Canon is still registering on the Richter scale.

Certainly the building shook for the better part of three hours as an energetic, all-Canadian cast of 29 rocked and stomped through 27 Queen songs, including Somebody to Love, Fat-Bottomed Girls, We Are the Champions and the classic Bohemian Rhapsody. The last is performed as a curtain-call number, the jubilant audience on its feet, waving glowsticks overhead.

Pop music is surely the world's most common language, with echoes of Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones, Sting, etc., reverberating from Kitimat to Kuala Lumpur. Package nostalgia properly and you can make millions, as the show's creators, novelist and comic Ben Elton and former Queenies Brian May and Roger Taylor, undoubtedly have.

WWRY is a rock concert thinly disguised as a musical and it comes complete with eye-popping lighting effects, spinning mirrored balls, litres of dry ice and a nine-metre-wide video screen used to flash everything from images of cheeseburgers and video games to black and white photos of rock legends who died young, not the least, Queen's Freddie Mercury. Fire marshals won't allow lighters — hence the glowsticks, handed out at the door.

Like its forebears — the show is still a sellout after four years in London's West End, and has spawned cloned hits in Australia, Spain, Russia, South Africa, Switzerland, Germany and Japan — the Toronto production is a rollicking, raunchy and raucous (earplugs are well advised) romp. The story line and characters are skeletal, bare floorboards on which to rev, ride and occasionally ridicule the engines of rock.

We open in an imaginary Orwellian world known as Planet Mall (née Earth), circa 2307 AD, a de facto police state controlled by a single fascistic corporation, Globalsoft. Right-think is the order of the day, every day. The Taliban-like rules are enforced top-down by the bikini-waxing CEO Killer Queen (Alana Bridgewater) and her sneering chief thug, Khashoggi (Evan Buliung).

There's music in this universe, but it's all gaga and drivel — programmed, digitized, soulless (like much of contemporary pop). Musical instruments have been officially banned.

But a few brave renegades — the Bohemians — live covertly, conspiring to rediscover the cultural relics of the past, including, of course, rock music. Into their midst come two misfits, Galileo (Yvan Pedneault) and Scaramouche (Erica Peck), dissidents in Globalsoft's homogeneous culture.

Galileo, who hears snippets of ancient rock lyrics in his head, is quickly recognized as their messiah, destined to lead them to the Holy Grail, a sacred electric guitar buried in the archeological ruins of Wembley Stadium, the former rock-concert mecca. They find it, naturally, and the whole edifice of Globalsoft somehow comes tumbling down. Rhapsody realized. Freedom trumps repression. Individuality conquers conformity.

It's all done with considerable panache, Ben Elton's tongue coyly nestled in his British cheek. The targets of his satire include not just the absurdities of mindless rigidity, but pop music itself — icons like Madonna, Britney Spears and American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken, even Queen itself — and, by extension, the mesmerized audiences who carry the flame for their overpaid, undertalented idols. Elton's script even tosses in a few amusing scraps of Canadian content-references to Maple Leaf Gardens, Celine Dion, the Canadarm.

What matters here are vocal chops, not acting, so it's not surprising that both the young stars sing better than they act. Pedneault's speech is occasionally handicapped by his French accent (though Elton, making a virtue of a potential liability, works in a clever gag using his bilingualism), but he has genuine stage presence and his voice has raw, visceral power. So, too, does Peck, in her first professional performance. She can belt — think Ethel Merman in punk — but she can also sing sweetly. I can see her playing this part in various WWRY productions for some time.

Among the others, I was impressed by the muscular Sterling Jarvis (as Britney), who almost steals the first act; the rock chick Suzie McNeil (as the Bohemian Oz); Evan Buliung's blond-coiffed comic-book villain in dark glasses, Khashoggi, and Jack Langedijk's Pop, who captures the ageless, blissed-out hippie in all of us.

Despite the veneer of message, no one should take We Will Rock You seriously. It's about the music, and only about the music, and if Queen's exotic harmonies and pulsating rhythms still ricochet in your head, you'll be very happy here. But don't forget the earplugs.

First Mamma Mia!, exploiting the songs of Sweden's ABBA, now We Will Rock You and Queen. Can Mandy, based on the music of Barry Manilow, and Candle in the Wind, based on Elton John's, be far behind?

We Will Rock You continues at the Canon Theatre to April 29 (416-872-1212).