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Newsday Review - by Linda Winer
© Newsday
Boy, can 'Billy' dance!
Musical gets B'way on its feet
By Linda Winer. linda.winer@newsday.com
Bottom line: A gotta-dance classic
Broadway's long, dark, dry spell of big, smart, smash musicals is officially over. "Billy Elliot," the 2005 London adaptation of the 2000 movie, finally arrived in a production as seriously thrilling as it is deeply lovable.
Like the film, this is the two-headed dance-driven story about the devastating 1984 strike in a small mining town in northern England and about a motherless 11-year-old boy's unlikely passion for ballet. The show is crawling - not to mention tapping and leaping - with dauntingly talented children, presented with a blissful lack of preciosity and lots of blazing intelligence and theatricality by director Stephen Daldry and choreographer Peter Darling.
Much already has been said about the three boys who alternate performances as Billy (one of whom is Wantagh's Trent Kowalik). On the basis of Tuesday's Billy, David Alvarez, the massive demands of this star role have not been overstated. Alvarez is terrific - with a grave-kid undercurrent, lots of unforced charm, finely sculpted long muscles and the ability to unspool ballet wizardry without losing the remarkable elegance of his line. His singing is simple and direct, with a musicality more important than show-biz salesmanship.
About those songs. Elton John has written an ambitious, varied, altogether satisfying grown-up score that, after his sentimental Disney music, we never dreamed he had in him. Author Lee Hall, who also created the movie book, writes lyrics that sit with grace and humor on John's rich, character-revealing melodies. Billy's spacey grandmother (Carole Shelley) has a waltz with which to remember her young self. Billy's tough, but not hard, ballet teacher (the commandingly spiky Haydn Gwynne) gets to boogie-woogie. The miners, including Billy's tender, conflicted father (Gregory Jbara), face the riot police with rousing anthems that, as the strike wears on, turn profoundly sad.
Darling's impressive choreography seems to infuse everyone in the big cast with a personal story, even the police who, at the start, have a fidgety hand ballet suggesting their own vulnerability. In an important number, "Solidarity," the cops, the miners and the ballet girls fade in and out of one another's contrasting realities, with cinematic power. There is a "Chicago" takeoff for teeny ballerinas and even a dream-ballet, the white-swan adagio, for Billy and his older self, with levitation by Tchaikovsky and a couple of wires.
Vast yet somehow intimate sets (by Ian MacNeil) take us easily from union hall to the street, from Billy's little twirling bedroom to his audition at the Royal Ballet School, without overwhelming the story. Thatcher-era documentary footage brings clarity to what could have been a faraway conflict (Newcastle dialects do not get in the way of clarity).
Every so often, including at the feel-good curtain call, Daldry appears to stop trusting the moody power of his drama-with-music and throws in a jarring musical-comedy routine. Nevertheless, this show feels good.