Bohemian rapacity

We will, we will ... bludgeon you. We will, we will ... baffle you.

We will, we will ... make you want to find a good Queen tribute band ...

Actually, the show is called “We Will Rock You,” but rocking you was way down on the list of things this flashy musical from London, based on the songs of the rock band Queen, did in its North American debut Wednesday.

Bypassing the usual avenue of Broadway or a national tour, it’s hoping to settle in at the 1,450-seat Le Theatre des Arts at the Paris Las Vegas hotel for a long run in what some see as an increasingly theater-friendly tourist mecca.

“We Will Rock You” is the second London-originated musical based on the work of a pop music act to hit pay dirt in recent years, following the ABBA-orgy “Mamma Mia” in commercial success and in basic formula -- threading a group’s songs on the skewer of a story line.

This kind of musical reanimation can make sense for audience and artist. There’s a pleasure in hearing a favorite song in a new context that makes narrative use of a lyric and might even reveal hidden aspects of the piece.

And you can’t knock the chance to hear the music of a defunct act played live again. For the artist, it’s a way to get the old catalog active without hustling placement in film scores and TV commercials.

Queen’s music is ideal for this treatment. The English band was theatrical itself, becoming one of the biggest groups of the 1970s through its combination of force and flamboyance.

Though its two most enduring songs, “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions,” are soccer-stadium anthems, Queen built its career on a fearless, constantly surprising mix of operatic pop, progressive rock, rootsy rockabilly and hard rock, all tied together by the charisma and voice of singer Freddie Mercury, who died of complications of AIDS in 1991.

Unlike ABBA, whose U.S. tours were rare and whose music was rarely heard live as powerfully as it is in “Mamma Mia,” Queen was a busy band, and this stage musical has to compete with the formidable memory of its winning live concerts.

The group’s guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor are the musical’s “worldwide music supervisors,” and they do the job of preserving the songs’ essence while passing them on to the show’s characters.

As a play, though, “We Will Rock You,” written by English comedian and author Ben Elton, lacks the band’s gift for keeping its diverse tendencies under control and for finding an intimacy within the grandeur.

It might work as a broadly drawn fable if it were simple and stylized and capable of staying on track. But the two-hour production grows increasingly complicated and incoherent as it crawls to the finish line.

You have to admit, though, the scale of its settings and concept is true to Queen’s grandiosity, even if it violates the band’s abhorrence of cliches.

“We Will Rock You” is a broadside against corruption and compromise that looks in on the struggle between freedom (rock ‘n’ roll) and conformity (corporate rule) in a distant future, when a corporation headed by a cruel dominatrix with flaring nostrils and an evil eye (Patti Russo) produces and controls all music.

Instruments and live music are illegal, and rock is only a vague flicker in the minds of a group of fugitive “bohemians,” who dress in punky patchwork and dwell in a subterranean chamber called Heartbreak Hotel.

Looking like a mixed cast of “Les Miserables” and “Mad Max,” they’re a pack of motley misfits who have adopted the names of ancient rock stars (sometimes inappropriately, as in the case of the muscular, scowling black man who calls himself Britney Spears) and await the coming of a messiah-like “dreamer” who will bring music back to life by excavating a buried guitar. Something like that.

He is Galileo Figaro (Tony Vincent), a mixed-up kid who’s determined to be an individual, and whose head is constantly receiving strange phrases, such as “Help, I need somebody. Help, not just anybody” and “Baby, we were born to run.” Vincent gives his character a kind of geeky charm, but he never transforms him into the charismatic rock god the story demands.

But then “We Will Rock You” tends to fumble most of its dramatic payoffs, including the fate of the bad guys and the discovery of the magic guitar.

Without any challenging twists, this hodgepodge of “Tommy,” “1984” and “Lord of the Rings” is a cheer-the-hero, hiss-the-villain affair whose only real appeal is in isolated production numbers.

The corporation’s top cop, the burly, grey-haired Khashoggi (Rich Hebert), brings a Meat Loaf-like intensity and glee to a powerful “The Seven Seas of Rhye,” and the bohemians team with the Dreamer and his spunky, punky girlfriend Scaramouch (Aspen Miller) for an infectious “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.”

The evil CEO, whose name is Killer Queen, proves to be a cut more kinky than most of the rebels in her showcase piece “Fat Bottomed Girls,” and crueler than Khashoggi in “Another One Bites the Dust.”

The audience at Wednesday’s invitation-only opening reacted giddily to most of the show, especially to a salute to rock stars who died young, and to the moments that most resembled a rock concert, spinning their glow sticks and waving their arms like a stadium crowd during “We Are the Champions.”

In the end, “We Will Rock You” isn’t enough to diminish Queen’s music. But the band doesn’t do much for its legacy by attaching it to a vehicle that settles for the pat and predictable.