new yorker critic writes. mr lahr is author of excellent book joe orton bio - (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)ON YOUR TOES
by JOHN LAHR
“Billy Elliot” leaps from screen to stage.
Issue of 2005-07-04
Posted 2005-06-27
Bannered across the poster for London’s new hit musical “Billy Elliot” (at the Victoria Palace)—a collaboration between two of the country’s mightiest showmen, the director Stephen Daldry and the composer Sir Elton John—is an unbuttoned quotation from the usually buttoned-down British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. “The greatest British musical I have ever seen,” it says. What, I wonder, are the other great British musicals? “Salad Days”? “The Boy Friend”? “Cats”? The British love musicals; they just don’t do them very well. The problem, it seems to me, is spiritual. The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity—the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it.
“Billy Elliot” is fascinating because it situates itself precisely on the cultural fault line between the two traits. The scarcity depicted here is the 1984 miners’ strike—a brutal yearlong losing battle that the miners of Yorkshire waged against Margaret Thatcher and the Tories, who felt that the pits weren’t economically viable, and were determined to break up the all-powerful miners’ union. Abundance appears in the form of the eleven-year-old Billy, who is as impoverished as the next striking miner’s child but who turns out to be rich in talent. “All out together / All out as one,” the miners sing as they are called out on strike, but Billy’s gift sets him apart from his embattled community and, for a while, from himself. Billy wants to dance, not demonstrate. He starts off as a nonentity and ends up, in our eyes at least, a star. (The musical might as well be called “Coal Diggers of 1984.”)
Both the film version, which was nominated for three Academy Awards in 2001, and the stage version of “Billy Elliot” have touched people. When a story gets at something elemental in the dream life of its audience—here it’s the longing to discover your desire and to seize your destiny—narrative vulgarities are often overlooked. This, it seems to me, explains how a show with a mawkish, melodramatic book, and without a single memorable melody or lyric, could have worked its way so deeply into the public imagination. The team that made the movie also made the musical, and therein lies the problem: it’s a first for both Daldry and his screenwriter, Lee Hall, who wrote the book and the lyrics for the show. Ordinarily, putting a musical into the hands of novices would be a recipe for disaster; in this case, it’s a recipe for a muddle masquerading as a major event. The show has every right to call itself a commercial hit, but no right, I think, to call itself excellent.
“Billy Elliot” begins with postwar footage of a speaker at an annual coal miners’ gala invoking “this new adventure” of nationalization and “the great experiment of socialism.” The curtain rises forty years later as that socialist dream is turning to disappointment. Onstage, the strikers, who are black-and-white caricatures of commitment, seem literally to emerge out of the documentary, weighed down by historical fact and coated in the impasto of slogans. By contrast, both physically and psychologically Billy wants to take flight. The musical never properly melds the two dimensions of air and earth, of Billy and the miners. By nature, the musical genre deals with fantasy, not fact; it is at its most political when it delivers pleasure, not dogmatic persiflage. Hall doesn’t seem to understand this, and his prolix, repetitive book quickly loses its way. When the miners are the issue—and their story eats up a fair portion of the saga—the musical stalls; the proletariat here really are lumpen. When Billy dances, however, everything comes alive.
On the night that I saw the show, Billy was performed by the hardworking James Lomas (he alternates in the role with Liam Mower and George Maguire), a confident and handsome teen-ager who is well able to convey Billy’s sensitive soul, trapped in a stultifying macho world. Dance allows Billy both to express that sensitivity and to act out a rage that he lacks the words to formulate. Billy, as the show takes pains to emphasize, is not liberating his inner poofter through dance. The musical, nonetheless, does indulge in a little homophobic fun at the expense of Billy’s gormless cross-dressing sidekick, Michael (Ashley Lloyd, in the performance I saw), who, at the boys’ Saturday boxing class, would rather punch the instructor in the balls than lay a glove on Billy. The two boys’ number, “Expressing Yourself,” in which dresses on hangers dance with them, is a charming idea, but the visual invention never quite pays off. When Billy is doing his twists and twirls, his youthful entrechats and jetés, the immanence of the extraordinary is credible. When he tap-dances, it isn’t; Savion Glover he ain’t. Still, Billy’s daring is best demonstrated by dance, not by plot. In a balletic vision of what he might be, Billy swoops and swings high above his imagined older self (Isaac James), a thrilling moment that underscores both the character’s transcendence and the performer’s physical bravery.
Although most of the subsidiary characters here are rudimentarily sketched, Billy’s dyspeptic Gran (the excellent Ann Emery) plants the seeds of his moral courage in “We’d Go Dancing,” a song about her thirty-three years of unhappy marriage, which earns the first round of applause from the audience. “If I’d only known then what I know now / I’d’ve given them all the finger,” she sings. But the person who really coaxes Billy to find himself is the no-nonsense dance instructor Mrs. Wilkinson (Haydn Gwynne), whose ballet class follows boxing at the local hall. Billy is drawn to her because she sees his promise; we are drawn to her because she’s one of the few characters with a wash of personality. Gwynne establishes a real sardonic rapport with the audience as well as with Billy. With a bevy of pudgy would-be ballerinas as her comic chorus girls, she puts over with humorous swagger the sour anthem “Shine,” a third-generation Xerox of Chicago’s “Razzle Dazzle.” “It doesn’t matter if you’re unemployed / Only partially humanoid,” Mrs. Wilkinson jokes. Typical of the show’s sloppiness, the rhyme is wrong both for the character and for the era.
Most of the heavy lifting in “Billy Elliot” is left to Daldry, who has a flair for the spectacular. Some of his stage pictures are splendid: Billy soaring through beams of light; Billy throwing himself furiously against the Plexiglas shields of massed policemen, who beat a fierce tattoo with their truncheons; and, at the finale, the defeated miners returning to work and sinking belowground as Billy is poised to rise. These images say more than the prose ever does. But, out of a kind of narrative desperation, Daldry is forced to borrow from the tattered grab bag of avant-garde tricks: behemoth puppets, masks on the backs of heads—any surprise to cover up the lacklustre book and music. And, after Billy’s sensational explosion at the police, Daldry can’t properly clinch the moment. Billy lies back on the ground, then simply gets up and walks offstage: end of Act I. Fatigue seems to have blinkered Daldry’s critical ability. At the end of the show, just before Billy sets off for ballet school and his future, Daldry allows him to read a letter to his dead mother. “I’ll always be myself, Mammy,” Billy says. “And I will always be true. Love you forever.” Billy exits with a tear in his eye and a bag in his hand—a bag, I guess, full of bathos.
When the most delightful part of a show is the curtain call—a ten-minute knees-up, with the entire cast, including the miners, now thankfully liberated from their earnestness, dressed in tutus—you know you’re in trouble. The manipulative high jinks more or less declare the show’s thematic bankruptcy. “Billy Elliot” may look nostalgically toward Yorkshire, but its heart is planted firmly in Fort Knox. Whereas the film’s finale flashed forward to show a mature Billy performing “Swan Lake,” the musical forgoes displays of prowess for pandering; it does get the audience high, but with camp, not content. (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)
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Billy Elliot Musical (Read 19,931 times)
