'We Will Rock You' sounds like Queen spirit

Long before he wrote the book a dozen years ago for

We Will Rock You

, the hit musical based on the songs of Queen, British comic author Ben Elton had felt the glam-rock quartet's touch.

"When I left home at 16 to go to college for drama, Queen was No. 1 and stayed No. 1 for my entire first semester with 'Bohemian Rhapsody,' " Elton says of the band's operatic 1975 smash song that made the group a household name. "Those first lonely months away, living in a bedsit, Queen was there. They moved me, made me feel like I could do anything. They're uplifting. When I got involved with this musical, I believed the story had to present Queen's spirit, how their music made you feel, more so than the personalities of its membership."

We Will Rock You, about a future in which music and free thought are banned and replaced by marketing and cynicism, opens Tuesday night at the Academy of Music.

"Ben had a very real and imaginative idea," says Brian May, 66, the guitarist who, with Roger Taylor, John Deacon, and the late Freddie Mercury, originally made up Queen. "You've got to do more than string some words together in between songs. His is a genuine encapsulation of the yearning of kids."

Elton has surely felt victorious since university, what with penning edgy U.K. comic series such as The Young Ones and the various Blackadders, among other Brit television fare. Along with writing and performing for British television, Elton has written novels, screenplays, and theater scripts, including a collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the film and theater version of Love Never Dies, a follow-up to Phantom of the Opera. For all Elton's top-selling work, fellow comedians and British journalists have called the once-left-leaning social satirist a "sellout," with We Will Rock You as his greatest offense. "It's absurd," Elton says by phone from New York, "but I believe that when you do an awful lot of stuff, successfully, people get a bit weird about you."

Elton was in the middle of a particularly fertile period in 1999 when he got a call from Queen manager Jim Beach to discuss something he'd never before done: work on a project that was non-self-generated.

The band, its management, and Mercury's family - all of whom have equal voting and veto power as to what gets done in Queen land - had been trying to get a stage show off the ground for years. "We had chucked the idea of a musical with a biographical theme - even got as far as workshopping one - but just didn't feel comfortable," May says by phone from London. "That idea never felt like the celebration we wanted it to be, something joyful that would send people out of the theater uplifted.

"When we met Ben, he told us that if we didn't want to be in the past," May says, "we should move into the future."

So that's where Elton put the characters of We Will Rock You - in a future where kids have lost their ability to express themselves, enslaved by a consumer-driven world of faceless marketing and spin.

"It's very funny," May says. "The satire actually comes out more and more as time goes by, and the real world actually becomes more like what Ben painted it to be."

Elton, 54, giggles when he explains that humor is what Queen's intended musical needed, to capture the spirit of a group that had been more like goofy brothers than bandmates since getting together in the early '70s. If anything was ever to make it to the stage, a Queen musical would need great laugh lines. "These guys were very self-mocking," Elton says. "They loved to laugh at themselves. That's why they approached me."

The author grew up with traditional musical theater and was a rock aficionado with a yen for Eddie Cochran and Jerry Lee Lewis. Mostly, Elton loved Queen's organic dedication to guitar-based rock, recalling how the group's earliest albums came with the disclaimer "No Synthesizers," a vibe he insists translated to his script.

"Sticking to the initial beliefs of the band and their gutsy, guitar-led credo ties into my concerns about the homogenization of the culture, that some superpower will dominate and reduce the individuality of humanity," Elton says, "and how we must fight it."

May says Elton became, in a way, part of Queen, and took advantage of the band's preoccupation in so many of their songs, like "I Want to Break Free," with the common individual's search for destiny.

"We're blessed with quite good songs, you know, that actually do express so many of the ideas in his script, so he's quite clever there," May says.

"We were never the type to just write about the simplicity of what it means to be a rock star. We tried to write about your hopes and dreams."

We Will Rock You

Opens 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Academy of Music, 240 S. Broad St. Through Sunday.

Tickets: $20-$110.50

Information: 215-731-3333, www.kimmelcenter.org.EndText