Power Outage at Rockwell Theater but Our Show Still played on
The inaugural performance at the Rockwell Theatre in Bristol Connecticut was Celebrating Queen on 9th September 2023. The show had it all, great sound, great lighting, a great audience, and a cracking setlist. 48 minutes into our set, just as our amazing guitarist Steve Burchell was banging out the solo for Tie Your Mother Down, a lightning strike came down and wiped out the power to the Rockwell Theatre. The Power Outage at Rockwell Theater also affected 14,000 homes in the local area.
At that time the emergency lights at the venue came on and the audience and the band were unsure as to what had happened. The news soon came through that the whole area was out. Undeterred, Celebrating Queen decided to keep going with an impromptu performance of Doing All Right from Queen’s first album. Thankfully we had a beautiful grand piano so we could do something to entertain the audience while we awaited a decision from the venue on what would happen from that point.
Following the first song, the band decided to perform Love of My Life from the album A Night at The Opera, which was also featured in the movie Bohemian Rhapsody. The audience lapped it up and loved what the band was doing to keep spirits up. Following that, the epic, Bohemian Rhapsody was performed in Full The audience joined in a rapturous song, singing every note from the verse to the opera section and into the hard headbanging rock section of the song. The audience loved it. Thankfully before the show Celebrating Queen had given access to all the lyrics to the show so the audience had no excuses not to join in.
Unfortunately, due to the emergency power quickly diminishing the decision was made to evacuate the audience from the theatre just in case all power failed. It was a disappointing end to the first show at the Rockwell and Celebrating Queen’s first show in Bristol in many years. However, Celebrating Queen WILL be back in Bristol very soon for a well-overdue do-over of this show.
Video of the audience performing Bohemian Rhapsody have been doing the rounds but you can find a very nice version below.
Thank you to the audience of Bristol Connecticut and the Rockwell Theatre.
You can find some press coverage of the Power Outage at Rockwell Theater incident below.
