Jukebox musicals and KTCo's We Will Rock You

30 October 2026

Jukebox musicals are a convergence of two trends: slapped-together musicals and revues.

In the olden days, say the 20s and 30s, musicals were mostly slapped together: you’d put in whatever songs you had handy, and if you had a place where you didn’t have anything that you liked but someone you knew had written a song that you thought might fit, you called them up and used it. A lot of songs that became standards emerged from that world but its musicals, if they’re performed at all nowadays, have not mostly survived intact. They have kept having the slapping process repeated, being varied and reinforced with other songs by the same writers, giving you the modern Anything Goes, which is quite a long way from the 1934 original. A glorious peak of that trend is Crazy For You, which reached Broadway in 1992: it is sort of a modernisation of Girl Crazy from 1930, but with new characters, a new title, and absolutely whatever songs by the Gershwin brothers work best. Me And My Girl is another modern example of the same sort of thing.

In parallel, we have the modern form of the revue: a slightly-glorified concert of songs usually all by one writer or team. This is a nice cheap way to put on a Broadway show, which I think got its big start with Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris in 1968. Brel was a songwriter who never wrote musicals but whose songs feel like they have a quality that makes them work performed as if they were theatre songs. Then you go via Side By Side By Sondheim to Smokey Joe’s Cafe in 1995, which is a revue of songs by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. At that point, it looked to some people like revues and revivals were the future of the Broadway musical: the only new musical that season on Broadway was Sunset Boulevard. Within a couple of years we had Lion King and a whole new way of doing stage musicals, but that’s another story.

So the natural thing to do, given that you can squidge a musical into shape to accept the writer’s other songs and you can put together an evening based around just someone’s songs, is to invent the true jukebox musical: a story devised specifically to accommodate a catalogue of songs which originated with no thought of a musical in mind. Mamma Mia opened in 1999 and proved immediately that this works. Pretty soon we had Our House and We Will Rock You and lots lots more. What makes them work? What is the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful one? In particular, what makes We Will Rock You work, or not work?

In the pure form of the jukebox musical, where we have a new story devised around the required songs rather than a pseudo-biography, you don’t expect to hear recreations of the records. Songs will be spread out between different-sexed voices, lyrics will be tweaked, verses will be missed out, endings will be changed, and so on. So you can’t go in expecting to judge it as if you were watching a tribute band. Can you go in expecting to judge it as a musical?

Yes, you can. These things work because they’re real: the writers and the audiences and even the actors are in on the joke, but the characters aren’t. The characters aren’t in a jukebox musical, they’re in their world, however unnaturally contrived that world may be from the outside. Scaramouche should be yearning to break free and looking for someone to love and Galileo should be yearning to break free and dreaming. Scaramouche’s attitude problem is a secondary characteristic not a primary one, and Galileo shouldn’t be about getting to the songs, even if the show around him is. The thing that makes the show work, as for any other show, is characters you can feel with expressing things you can feel with, whether they’re talking or singing. It’s not pantomime; every time a character seems to be aware that they have a song coming on, something is lost. It’s all nonsense to us but it shouldn’t play like it’s nonsense to them.

And then at another level there’s an irony to sitting in a theatre listening to old music carefully packaged for mass consumption, while simultaneously feeling that I’m being lectured about the dangers of conformity and the superiority of actually playing an instrument. I could be at home with a guitar in my hand right now.

I think of myself as liking WWRY but this is my roundabout way of saying that I didn’t enjoy KTCo’s production. Maybe I’m stretching and WWRY just isn’t for me. But I go to the theatre to feel something and this didn’t make me feel much.