What do critics know?…..

”Only hard-core Queen fans can save it from an early bath,” wrote my Daily Express colleague We Will Rock You when it opened in May 2002, and I myself called it a “grim spectacle” and “tacky, trashy tosh” in the Sunday Express. Those were some of the kinder comments: the Daily Mail said it was a “shallow, stupid and totally vacuous new musical,” the Mail on Sunday agreed that this “dire, dull show” could “easily be summed up in two words: rock bottom”, and the Telegraph opined that far from being guaranteed to blow your mind, it was instead “guaranteed to bore you rigid”, concluding “The show is prole-feed at its worst”.

Yet tonight – having outlived at least two of the above critics, at least professionally speaking – We Will Rock You celebrates its 5th birthday at the Dominion Theatre. As the famous saying goes, “nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public”, and the same thing clearly applies here.

When the editor-in-chief of Variety, Peter Bart, objected to what Matt Wolf, his then-London critic, wrote about the musical Billy Elliot, he wrote in an editorial, “The job of critics is to deliver their opinions, to be sure, but it is especially troubling for Variety critics to appear disdainful of ‘audience’ shows… Over the span of its 100-year history, Variety critics have often pointed up the commercial potential of major blockbusters while acknowledging their artistic shortcomings, but we’ve made some bad calls, too.”

In his view, that was one of them; and Matt eventually paid the price, as I blogged here. But if we all had to walk the plank after our negative reviews of We Will Rock You, there might not be any of us left in the critical stalls.

Actually, would anyone care – or notice? Clearly, the audiences flocking to see We Will Rock You five years on are not paying attention to the reviews; nor do they at Fame – the Musical, as I realised while I was sat amongst a packed stalls at the matinee on Saturday. Some shows happily achieve their own public momentum, regardless of what the critics say, and are therefore critic-proof in every sense: Dirty Dancing is surely another, as I blogged about when it opened, though the reviews in that case were quite favourable: obviously we didn’t want (in Peter Bart’s words) to “appear disdainful of ‘audience’ shows”.

It is not, perhaps, our job to cheerlead bad public taste – or indeed to sneer, as I might well be here, at that public taste. But we ignore it, too, at our peril. Of course, first nights are not an appropriate place at which critics can glean what the public taste is anyway – the audience is so full of vested interests that the reaction isn’t “real”. But its instructive to go see a show like Fame, at a “real” performance with a “real” audience, and realise just how much real pleasure it is giving.

Even if, in the case of Fame, it actually shortchanges them: they’ve come to see the film onstage, and except for an early burst of the title song and a curtain call rendition of it in full, they don’t actually get it. (Dirty Dancing, by comparison, is far more literal, recreating the movie scene-for-scene). But it gives them a bunch of youthful kids, full of zestful energy, an engaging story of sorts (if not a particularly well structured one, dramatically speaking), and finally the sight of kids dancing on top of a yellow New York cab, which makes them think they’ve been given the movie experience. It’s a brilliant double-bluff.

We Will Rock You, meanwhile, gives audiences repackaged versions of the Queen songs they’ve come to hear, all wrapped in a big, noisy spectacle. That seems to be enough. Critics, in these circumstances, are the proverbial eunuchs at an orgy; maybe we just don’t have the balls to join the party.