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If things had gone as planned, the lead role of Freddie Mercury in "Bohemian Rhapsody" – the biopic about the rock band Queen that will open Friday, Nov. 2 – would have been played by Sacha Baron Cohen instead of Rami Malek.
That's right: instead of the son of Egyptian Coptic Christian immigrants, born in Los Angeles, the man who struggled in underwear and pantyhose representing Queen's outrageously flamboyant singer could have been l & rsquo; Actor-comedian Anglo-Jewish better known as Borat or Erran Morad. from "Who is America?" Perhaps there would have never been an Erran Morad if Cohen had followed his ten-year-old plan to write, produce, direct and play in the film, plans that were missed when & # 039; He withdrew from the project citing "creative differences" with the surviving members of Queen, who had the last word on everything related to the film.
If that had been the case, it would not have been the first time that Mercury, who died of AIDS in 1991, was described by a Jew. Over the past seven years, American-Jewish singer Adam Lambert has been the lead singer at Queen, since Queen's guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor met Lambert behind the scenes of the American TV competition. Idol. " Lambert's mother, Leila, is a dental hygienist with Romanian Jewish roots. She was inspired by Queen's one when she played in front of 50,000 adoring fans in Tel Aviv in 2016. During the concert, Lambert enamelled sentences in Hebrew and Yiddish, including "Erev tov", "todah raba" "oy vey", "oy vey iz mir", and "Oy gevalt" (he shvitzing, you see), and guitarist May has even wrapped up a segment of "Hava Nagilah" in one of his guitar solos. In Israel, Lambert went to Jerusalem, where he took a selfie at the Western Wall, which he then posted on Instagram.
By the early 1970s, Queen had caught the attention of the public with her unusual combination of hard rock, glam rock and offbeat pop assignments, highlighted by Mercury's catchy vocals. The band has entered the rock stratosphere with the mega opera hit that gives its title to the new film. "Bohemian Rhapsody" became the band's reference song, appearing on what would become the group's first hit album, "A Night at the Opera" from 1975, still considered by many to be its best. The group's next album, "A Day at the Races," dating back to 1976, is also named after a film by the Marx brothers. The story goes that Groucho himself was so moved by the gesture that he invited the band to visit him in March 1977 in Los Angeles, where he would have sung the band with one of the his own songs, and they made the gift with a cappella interpretation of "39", a sci-fi song from "A Night at the Opera".
Queen herself once had a Canadian Jewish keyboard player among her band members. Although they rarely worked with guest instrumentalists, the group had already recruited Fred Mandel, one of the first rock 'n' roll Zeligs – he had previously worked with Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd and Cheap Trick – to join them at their 1982 world tour. Mandel continued to work with Queen on their 1984 album, "The Works," as well as on solo projects by Mercury and guitarist Brian May. After Queen, Mandel then played with Supertramp and his idol, Elton John. Mandel was raised in a fairly observant house in Regina, Saskatchewan, where he attended a Hebrew school before his family moved to Toronto, where he became a bar mitzvah.
Mercury himself was born Farrokh Bulsara in 1946 in Zanzibar. His parents were Parsis, from India, where they came back when Farrokh was still young. He grew up mainly in India as a member of the Parsi minority, whose origins date back to Persia and still adheres to Zoroastrianism, which would have affinities with Judaism, the most obvious being the similarities between the prophetic figures of Zoroaster (or Zarathustra). ) and Moses, both of whom received a law passed down from God while they were at the top of a mountain.
Seth Rogovoy is one of the Forward's editors. He writes a biography of George Harrison.
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