At the Metro, Ridgewood Native's 'Alien(s)' Villains Love Queen

A Western Springs native, veteran and graduate has hit the big stage at the Chicago, performing in iconic, dark horror-film made famous by Ian Holm and Paul Reiser—and featuring the flamboyant rock music of Queen.

This mad, comic high-concept pastiche is Alien Queen: The Concert, with Tom McGunn pulling villainous double-duty as Cash and Burka, parodies of the antagonists Ash and Burke from the famous and pioneering Alien and Aliens films. This time, however, the villains—and everyone else in the cast—are rocking out, Freddie Mercury style.

“It’s crazy. It’s amazing how seamlessly the music of Queen fits the Alien movie franchise, McGunn said. “You’d think that Mercury wrote the songs for the movie. The word I keep using is ‘campy’—it’s absurd, and everyone in it is so talented that they fully commit to how absurd it is.”

Alien Queen debuted in December 2010 at the Circuit nightclub as a production of the Scooty & JoJo show and quickly became a runaway critical and commercial vaudeville hit. It has now been picked up by the Metro theater as a sporadic feature, next showing on December 10^th.

“My favorite part of doing the show is having the entire audience singing along with the show,” said creator and director Scott Bradley, otherwise known as the “Scooty” half of Scooty & JoJo, and the titular Alien Queen in the show. (There’s a lot of gender-bending—hey, it’s Queen—along with some twisting of names.)

“As opposed to a traditional setting, this is like a full Queen studio band,” added Bradley. “The group is screaming ‘Somebody to Love’ and the audience is all out there screaming along with you.”

McGunn, a Ridgewood transplant from Indian Head Park who retains family in Western Springs, graduated from Columbia College in 2009 and has bounced around the Chicago theatre circuit ever since, currently also doing promotional voice-overs for Broadway in Chicago.

He has a number of roles under his belt, including playing the title role in The Who’s Tommy (for which he was nominated for a Jeff Award), as well as multiple performances at the Lyric Opera, the Bailiwick, and the Circle Theatre.

Bradley said that casting for Alien Queen was an extremely difficult proposition, given that actors had to handle Mercury’s legendary range along with comic timing and tricky choreography: “a really tough triple threat.” When it came to McGunn, however, there was no question.

“I knew from the moment he sang that he could nail it, and he had this comic sensibility that’s really precise,” Bradley praised. “His ability to bring that very malevolent presence to stage, and then make it believable that they are about to break out into song, is both believable and hysterically funny.”

McGunn has brought some of his Western Springs family to see the show—and said that their initial skepticism was soon won over.

“They didn’t know what they were in for,” he laughed. “And these middle-aged folks are walking into the Metro and they’re surrounded by guys in their 20s drinking, and they were terrified.

“And [soon] my mother and your 50-year-old aunt were jumping up and down and yelling along with ‘We Are the Champions.’”

Alien Queen: The Concert plays at the Metro on Dec. 10, with Battlestar Fantastica/DJ Boywonder opening with an hour of “sci-fi burlesque.” Doors open at 9 p.m.; show begins at 10 p.m. Tickets are available at scootyjojo.com, metrochicago.com, or by calling 773-549-4140.