Review: We Will Rock You at Booth Playhouse

By Perry Tannenbaum

May 1, 2026, Charlotte, NC – It may be an inborn genetic trait, as eternal as gender: you either love the music of Queen or, if you can, you shun it. Coming from the latter camp to Queen City Concerts’ latest conquest, We Will Rock You at Booth Playhouse, I could boast a near-total ignorance of the mighty metal band. To the distress of true believers, I was able to positively identify nothing in the Queen realm beyond Freddie Mercury, the twin trademarks of stadium rock – “We Are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You” – and the twin incarnations of “Bohemian Rhapsody”: as the apex of heavy metal pretension and as a motion picture.

Deciding to review Queen City’s new production was a cruel test of how far this wondrous company, with its breathtaking range, could take me out of my comfort zone. Beginning as a streamed series of Quarantine Concerts during the COVID pandemic in 2020, founder Zachary Tarlton rechristened his enterprise in 2022 when it went live with Tick, Tick…BOOM! – and remained true to its concert format and its exclusive devotion to relatively small and obscure Off-Broadway musicals for little more than a year.

With Kinky Boots and Titanic, they gradually discarded their music stands and playscripts, along with their disdain for lighting, costumes, and choreography. By sticking with their Concerts branding, they likely stunted the growth of their audience and community awareness of what they were really about. “Concerts” became truly obsolete as a description of the company in 2023, when QC Concerts presented Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2, in May and a rather dazzling Sunset Boulevard in November. Like special concert revivals up in New York, the typical non-Angels runs were preciously short, three performances at most, so you still left with that concert feeling of having experienced something unique, live, and never to be replicated.

By 2026, events at Booth Playhouse or the Stage Door at Blumenthal Performing Arts seem to have developed a cult following. At We Will Rock You, only the front-and-center seats were strangely vacant, either bought up by plutocrat subscribers who hate Queen or avoided by people like me who were wary of the sound pressure levels likely to be generated by a seven-piece electric band and a cast of more than twenty.

Notwithstanding the trendiness of the 2018 biopic title set the revert to live concert form, my opening night audience was older than the demographic you might expect. Occasional outbreaks of leather and glitter were to be found, but more prevalent was my own impulse in readying myself for the music of Queen: dressing down and casual. Torn between getting decked out in a T-shirt and a golf shirt, I had opted for the more conservative apparel, yet I found the rest of the audience similarly torn. Nobody was confusing this concert with a Charlotte Symphony event.

So there was a palpable, cult-like fellowship in the packed orchestra seats, even before the slacker musicians sauntered in and Tarlton took his conductor position behind one of the two keyboards. A key part of the test, for me, was going to be how empathetic Tarlton was intending to be in reasonably taming those fearsome high decibel levels. Seeing drummer Michael Charlton behind a plexiglass enclosure was not reassuring.

As it turned out, Tarlton was even kinder to my aging eardrums than I’d hoped. This was like middleweight metal behind reasonably amped vocalists, preeminently Patrick Stepp as Galileo, the far-in-the-future rebel/prophet reincarnation of Freddie Mercury in Ben Elton’s delightfully silly script. Until we reached the dreaded “Champions” and the stultifying title song (or is it rap?), Stepp was inevitably paired with Ally Teeples as Scaramouche, played with Gothic stolidity. Scaramouche, it seemed rather early, was fated to do Galileo and the fandango.

The duo introduced me pleasantly enough to “I Want to Break Free,” “Intuition,” “Headlong,” and “Hammer to Fall.” Yet Galileo and Scaramouche’s internet cloud oppressors, Vanessa Robinson as Killer Queen and Lamar Davis as Khashogi, were another vocal power couple, together on “A Kind of Magic” or apart: Robinson most notably on “Don’t Stop Me Now” and her namesake song, Davis on “Seven Seas of Rhye.” Really, the epic length of We Will Rock You nearly sped by with Kacy Connon’s stage direction (and uncredited choreography?), Kel Wright’s rockin’ lighting design, and Sarah Deutsch’s kaleidoscope of costumes: glad rags, punk, militant glitter, and breakouts of Bowie androgyny and leather. Boots, vests, and pants.

Most people will be amused by Elton’s futureworld, where Globalsoft, presumably a metastasizing Microsoft, has basically uploaded all life and soul to the cloud and banned music worldwide to the robotic humans below. Only a distant colony of Bohemians is a threat to rediscover the lone remaining musical instrument left on the planet and revive whatever rock once was. Like Buddy, Galileo and Scaramouche are almost totally clueless. But in his dreams, Galileo receives emanations from the dead, usually in the form of lame and hackneyed lyrics we all readily recognize.

In addition to not-bad-at-all discoveries like “Seven Seas” and “Under Pressure,” there was a new reason for me to harbor affection for Queen when “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” closed Act 1. Never knew it was theirs. And Darren Spencer, as Buddy, a Buddy Holly soulmate, caught me by surprise with “These Are the Days of Our Lives,” never on my radar before. On the other hand, when Robinson reached “Another One Bites the Dust” and Kasie Patlove as Oz exhumed “No One But You (Only the Good Die Young),” my reasons for despising Queen took on fresh fuel. Overall, QC Concerts’ journey through their songbook was quite worth taking and delightful, thanks  to Elton’s whimsy, Connon’s dynamic theatricality, and Tarlton’s spirited, unerring musicianship.

For those of you who love those Brits, do not hesitate!