Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Woodside Priory School will bring “We Will Rock You: School Edition,” featuring music from rock band Queen, to the school’s stage this week.

The spring musical, adapted from the original Broadway production, includes all of Queen’s greatest hits and is set 300 years in the future, according to the school’s website. Priory Upper School students will perform songs such as “Somebody To Love,” “We Are the Champions” and “Don’t Stop Me Now.”

The play follows the story of a boy called Galileo, a girl named Scaramouche, and a misfit rag-tag band of rebels known as The Bohemians. The group aims to defeat Killer Queen, a self-aware video game that leapt into her programmer’s body and now dictates the lives of everyone on the IPlanet. In this world, individuality is forbidden and rock music has been banned.

The show is directed by John Sugden, head of the Performing Arts Department, who says of the musical: “It’s not bubble gum, it’s a hammered nail of emotion and poetry that hits deeper and makes your body move. There’s a joy, truth, passion, drive, wisdom and heart wrenching vulnerability that underlies lyrics, beats and riffs that stick in your soul long after the lights come down.”

In an email, Sugden notes that one of the school’s “core Benedictine values is Individuality and much of this musical follows individuals breaking free from oppression, monotony and group-think to find their Individual voice. Along the way Community, Integrity, Hospitality and, through the transformational magic of Rock, even Spirituality, come into play.”

Performances are at 7 p.m. on March 5 through 7; and 2 p.m. on March 8, at Rothrock Performance Hall, 302 Portola Road in Portola Valley.

Tickets are $5 for students and $15 for adults and can be purchased at the door or here.

For more information, go here.

Angela Swartz is The Almanac's editor. She joined The Almanac in 2018. She previously reported on youth and education, and the towns of Atherton, Portola Valley and Woodside for The Almanac. Angela, who...

Leave a comment