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 Take a highly successful British film, get the director to adapt it into a stage version, Elton John to provide a musical score, and you should have the main ingredients for a big hit.
Stephen Daldry's 2000 film, Billy Elliot, tells the story of a young boy in a coal-mining village in County Durham who decides to take up ballet dancing, while the drama of the 1984 miners' strike is raging through the local community. He faces all the normal working-class prejudices from both neighbours and his family but, with the support of his gay friend, Michael, makes a go of it.
Whilst, as in the film, we see Billy learning his craft to the gentle music of Swan Lake, the choreography of the stage version brings to the fore the raw emotion of the miners - at first their confidence of victory and then the gradual bitterness and rage which replaces it when they realise they can't win. As one would expect in that environment, there is plenty of strong
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language and, of course, the famous Christmas pantomime scene where the miners plead for the end of Margaret Thatcher. There's also gentleness as when Billy makes an attempt at cross-dressing with his friend, Michael, and also sentimentality when he tries to invoke a conversation with his dead mother.
If there is a weakness, it's in the musical score. Elton John is said to have emerged from the film
premiere "sobbing". Many of the reviews of the stage premiere suggested that he had overplayed the syrup and failed to produce any strong show-stoppers. This may be splitting hairs as the show is undoubtedly a tour-de-force of rock opera, and will probably run for years. Quite what foreign tourists, the mainstay of the London west-end theatre, will make of what is essentially an English political statement, is another matter." Billy Elliot - The Musical" is currently at the Victoria Palace in London.
Michael Johnson...Music Mike
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