Jump for Glee

Media Moment: Evening News

Queen-related: Somebody to Love snippet

The unmistakable opening verse of Somebody To Love caught my ear the other night as the six o’clock news played over the TV. Without knowing the details of the news story, I glanced over and immediately assumed that the video footage was for a dinner theatre production of Queen songs.

Hmm. That’s interesting, I thought. How come I hadn’t heard about such a production through the typical Queen grapevine? Oh, that’s because it is a dinner theatre spoof of Glee which happens to feature some Queen songs.

The number of TV Glee characters gets
truncated but Queen songs still play key role
in local dinner theatre production.

Glee, both the TV series and the concert tour featured Queen heavily in the song list, so I’m not surprised that a dinner theatre version would also cover off some Queen. What did surprise me, though, was that Somebody to Love was chosen as the promo clip for the news segment. Even more surprising was that the script for the news anchors specifically mention the music of Queen and no other participating artist. Is that a product of the dinner theatre marketing team trying to find a selling feature for the show, or was it the script supervisor at the TV station that opted to run that angle?

What happened to Madonna? Journey? Fleetwood Mac? Whitney Houston? Surely they’d warrant some mention in the news clip.

When we decided to buy tickets for the show, I asked the ticket office for a copy of the song list since it wasn’t included in the playbill. There are a few staples on there but also a few surprises:

Winnipeg’s online promo for Jump for Glee.
Queen makes an appearance here, too.

Act 1:
Proud Mary
Bust-A-Move
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
Hold Me Tight
Mean
Express Yourself
Forget You

Act 2:
Under Pressure
You Can’t Hurry Love
Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me
Let’s Get It On
Fire
When I’m With You
Shout It Out Loud

Act 3:
Somebody to Love
Hello, It’s Me
I Gotcha
Almost Paradise
Bad
Everyday People – Jump

From what I could tell, this show has been to at least one other Canadian city — Celebrations Dinner Theatre in Winnipeg. The promo for that show (see above) is considerably less polished than the marketing used for Jubilations here in Calgary. For the Winnipeg gig, though, Queen is again the only band mentioned.

It would be interesting to see a song list from this production. Canadian songs like When I’m With You suggest that there could be a regional flavour to some of the song choices so perhaps the music covers slightly different territory in Manitoba as it does for Calgary. 

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