"Billy Elliot," a very moving film about a coal miner's son who wants to be a ballet dancer, written by Lee Hall and directed by Stephen Daltry, came out in 2000. The same team wrote and directed the musical now on Broadway, with music by Elton John, and it's a deeply layered piece with cinematic power that only many years of work, including a long run in London, can produce.
The dynamic set by Ian MacNeil, with Rick Fisher's brilliant lighting (and shadowing), and Nicky Gillibrand's vast range of costumes, the spectacular, thrilling choreography by Peter Darling, and a wonderful cast, all add up to a powerful Broadway musical.
The story is elemental: the boy's struggle, in a working-class community, to be a dancer is set against a miners' strike in the mid '80's.
I have some disagreements with parts of Act 1 (though they dissolve as the show progresses). At first, I didn't feel the boy drawn to dance by the beauty of movement that would enchant him with its look and feel; I felt that they were mocking ballet as the little ballet girls behaved clownishly; smelly smoke fills the theater when Carol Shelley as a lively grandma reminisces; the father, an excellent Gregory Jbara, looks about fifteen years too old for the character who describes himself as becoming a widower at thirty-seven, and would now be in his early forties, plus they drop in a dance number by giant women's dresses which could be left out. (I guess they didn't trust the play itself and had to throw in something extraneous as a divertissement for the tourists.) But when the rest of the dancing takes place, from the time Haydn Gwynne, the wonderful, frustrated teacher stuck in the backwaters, begins to teach Billy, it starts to cook. The coal miners' struggle found resonance with my early red days, and the show steps up into brilliance as a chorus line of cops and the strikers confront each other with the young ballet dancers in the middle -- a great juxtaposition.
Three boys alternate as Billy, and the one I saw, Trent Kowalik, is a phenom, a young Gene Kelly, who enchants at his audition sequence and leaves the audience gasping in a number where he dances with his future self (a marvelous Stephen Hanna) in a breathtaking "Swan Lake" duo, and we soar with him as he dances until he flies. There's also a terrific dance by the rather fat Thommie Retter that lit up the audience. Elton John's music, including an inspiring anthem and some lovely ballads, lifts the entire production. The show ends, and for the curtain call we have a giant production number, with the entire cast, coal miners and all, in tutus, in a "Swan-Lake"-meets-Chorus-Line finale. What a show!
