Choir! Choir! Choir! delivers on promise: We Will Rock You!

While hip-hop sensations Pitbull and Ludacris headlined at Bluesfest in Ottawa’s Lebreton Flats, a little closer to Parliament Hill, a different crowd filled the National Arts Centre’s Southam Hall to capacity.

Daveed Goldman and Nobu Adilman, the talented duo behind Canadian phenomenon Choir! Choir! Choir! (C!C!C!) drew 2,000 wanna-be rock stars for two solid hours of entertainment featuring the music of British legends Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon of Queen fame.

C!C!C! offers a unique music experience by turning the audience into a mass choir of performers. Adilman made sure everyone was on the same song sheet right from the get-go: “You are the show,” he told the packed house, “so if you have a bad time tonight, it’s on you!” Spoiler alert: no one heads home from a C!C!C! show with anything other than a smile plastered ear-to-ear, voice hoarse from belting out beloved refrains from classics hits.

The two Toronto-based founders of C!C!C! know what works: they’re now in their 13th year of connecting people through the power of music. Building on their unique blend of comedy, audience engagement, and musical energy, Goldman and Adilman have made a currency out of stringing together feel-good moments that make space for even the most introverted of closet singers to step out of their comfort zone and onto the virtual stage, and have the time of their life doing so.

On Saturday night, C!C!C! wasted no time getting the party started. Right from the top, the house lights revealed a larger-than-life video of Queen performing “Pressure,” with David Bowie. With song lyrics scrolling across the screen, it was clear what was to come next. “Stand up, Ottawa!” shouted Adilman, setting the energy dial to maximum, where it stayed for the rest of the night. The crowd went on a journey through nearly a dozen of the band’s other chart toppers before settling on the pièce de resistance, as Adilman coined it: “We Will Rock You!”

This is the part of the show that C!C!C! has perfected over time–teaching a three-part harmony to a group with varied musical acumen. Perhaps an ambitious selection, the Ottawa crowd was warmed up and ready. The impressive result of the mini-lesson in musical pitch, tone and timing is a short video that is often featured on the C!C!C! YouTube channel.

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Attending a C!C!C! show is like performing karaoke with 2,000 of your newest friends. It’s a HIIT (high intensity interval training) workout for people who love to sing, whether they care to admit it or not. Though you may not know the names of the people jiving around you, when you leave a C!C!C! show, you somehow feel connected to one another from having shared a mutual appreciation of a meaningful era in music history.

C!C!C! has fine-tuned a performance model that permits the duo to go with the flow. While every show typically spotlights the music of one iconic band, the secret ingredient to the success of C!C!C! seems to be the pair’s ability to live in the moment. Goldman and Adilman are known to adapt the show to the personality of the audience, break out into spontaneous songs of other well-known artists of the era, and bring audience members up on stage for an impromptu conversation. That means that no two C!C!C! shows are alike.  

Saturday night was no different. Early in the show, Adilman called a woman onstage after seeing her Instagram post. She shared on social media that she and her brother were determined to jump through every hurdle to get to Ottawa from two different U.S. states. It was important for the siblings to reunite at the C!C!C! Queen tribute because of the role that the band’s album, “The Game,” played in their youth.

Adilman told us that C!C!C! resisted building a Queen experience for many years, fearing that they couldn’t possibly do justice to the music. Eventually, Goldman and Adilman concluded that the significant culture change that Freddie Mercury and the rest of Queen drove through their songs deserved to be celebrated. It was indeed quite the task to honour a band that has been a mainstay in musical pop culture for more than half a century in just two hours, but C!C!C! nailed it.

The evening closed with a rich fervency rarely seen in Southam Hall, with audience members spilling from their seats and onto the stage for a mass recital of Queen’s six-minute signature hit, “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

We don’t know when C!C!C! will next return to the nation’s capital, but one thing is for sure: as the crowd reluctantly streamed back into the humid Ottawa night, the best of Queen echoing in their collective heads, plans were already being made to mark C!C!C! as a must-do for next time.

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