(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)Boys auditioning for the title role in Billy Elliot: The Musical.
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Think about it if you dare. You are looking for a boy from the North with wings on his feet and a voice to move the stars. A boy with energy, grit, hunger for opportunity. A boy apart. He has to be able to dance and sing and act with equal confidence - and he must be innately watchable. But he also needs a mysterious other quality. It's to do with what he is inside; whether he can make you care about what happens to him.
This boy will be 11 or 12 years old and he will have to hold a live audience of 1,500 in his hand. In one evening, his whole life will change. He will be the star of Billy Elliot: The Musical, a £5 million production by the team that created Billy Elliot the Oscar-nominated film - Stephen Daldry, director, Lee Hall, writer, Peter Darling, choreographer. Sir Elton John is writing the music.
To find the new Billy, you'll have travelled the country auditioning 2,500 eager lads, and then set up a school of excellence to train the final few. Yet the moment the lucky boy's voice breaks, he will be no good to you. He will be out of the show.
Disqualified because of a physical change no one can predict and no one can postpone. So you'll need another Billy Elliot waiting in the wings. And, because regulations prevent child actors from giving more than five performances a week, you'll need a third Billy Elliot: two to share the eight-show week.
The logistical nightmare doesn't end there. Billy, the miner's son who lives to dance, has a memorable best friend, Michael. So you must nurture three Michaels as well as three Billys. Because adolescent boys grow so fast and so unpredictably, every six months you'll have to recast. And that will mean tailoring the musical to the particular strengths of the new batch of boys. Supposing the show runs for three years, you'll have discovered, brought on and transformed the lives of 36 exceptional boys. To Stephen Daldry, the director, it has become almost vocational.
"I feel passionate about the show," he says. "But also about the role of the school outside the show, enabling and encouraging kids who might not otherwise have the opportunity to succeed.
Whether it's singing, gymnastics, or contemporary dance, when you see a kid get hold of something new and embrace it, it's heartrending, exciting. You see the total potential of the child. Of course, they need to have a stage personality and charm for the role, but they also need to have a level of tenacity to have persisted with dance; a passion that got them through. You're looking for a kid who can dance and sing and act but also for a kid with attitude. People still have a mixed reaction to boys who dance."
In casting Billy, the producers have mirrored the character's own journey from North-Eastern deprivation to West End glory. For most of these boys, there's the engulfing passion for the physical and emotional sensations of dance that Jamie Bell, the film's star, conveyed so well. There's the same hard graft, raw talent and determination to succeed. And behind a lot of them, there's the faith and commitment of a Julie Walters, Billy's dance teacher.
Despite the strong dance tradition in the North and even though the film made it "less pouffy" for boys to do ballet, there is still a stigma. "Some get support at home. Some have to go through something to dance," Daldry says. "It is incredibly moving. Every little kid has a background story. The story of any individual child is the story of the show."
Paul Mower, a pipe fitter from Hull, admits that he wasn't keen on his acrobatic son's fondness for dance, especially ballet. "I didn't want Liam to do ballet. I didn't think it was for boys. I wanted him to play rugby. But I've come round to the idea now."
Liam's dance teacher, Julie Lovewell, encouraged him to audition for the part of Billy. Now she's teaching the finalists tap.
During early auditions in Manchester, Newcastle, Leeds, Nottingham, Sheffield and Birmingham, Daldry met gifted boys, natural performers, who had outgrown their local dance schools or amateur drama groups. He didn't want them to slip through the net. Partly to keep up a constant supply of new boys for the musical, but to nurture exceptional talent beyond it as well, he founded the Billy Elliot School in Leeds, the only multi-disciplinary school of its kind in the North.
Its home is the lofty, peeling edifice of Leeds Civic Theatre. In one vast room with dirty windows and an old piano, four potential Billys are doing street dancing, throwing themselves into the routines with even more enthusiasm than they put into their somersaults and Britney Spears impersonations during the lunch break.
You can feel how much they want this part. Over the weeks, they've become mates but they never stop being rivals, too. In the shabby basement, four potential Michaels are learning tap. "Scrub, tap! Scrub, tap!" Julie Lovewell yells above the din. "A bit heavy. I want it lighter! I want to hear one pair of tap shoes." Sparks fly from their steel-tipped heels. They don't want to stop. Not now, not ever.
"I love tap", says Josh Andrews, 13, from Burton upon Trent."It's the only dance that makes a sound and that's exciting."
Brad Kavanagh, a gutsy 11-year-old with black curly hair, red cheeks and specs, has done something to his back, skateboarding. He's really an actor and has hardly had any dance instruction, but he's becoming a king of tap. Julie urges him to sit this one out. She might as well order water to run uphill.
For seven hours, they work like fury at the different disciplines - ballet, tap, singing, contemporary dance, street dance, funky dance - while Peter Darling observes things about them they would never suspect were interesting.
"It's not about whether you have done 95,000 ballet classes", he says. "I am interested in boys who've got natural movement, natural grace, not perfect feet. It's an internal thing."
Today, he's paying particular attention to a tall, good-looking boy of 13, Jonathon Cordin, from Nottingham, who joined the audition process late. Everyone loves the way he moves but, by the time the show opens later this year he may look too mature to be a plausible 11-year-old Billy.
Jonathon knows the score. They all do. "We are honest with them," says the children's casting director, Jessica Ronane. "We tell them this is an experience they must take away for life, whether or not they get the part."
Her message has been so successful that all the boys I spoke to said they were in it mainly for the experience - and so did their proud parents. They would be disappointed not to get the part, but not gutted.
They'd done brilliantly, blindingly, to get this far. They'd been "real gobsmacked" to meet some "pretty big people", like Stephen Daldry, Peter Darling and Jamie Bell. They'd worked with teachers who were the best at what they did.
Some of them, back home, are vastly outnumbered in their dance classes by girls. They've been teased as "ballet boys" at school. Here, they were really, really pleased to be with boys who liked the same thing as they did. It had been an adventure already. They'd had a lot of fun.
Sharon Boston, the mother of 12-year-old Kieron Boston (a potential Michael), from Sunderland, says: "You have to encourage them and keep them grounded at the same time. We try to keep things low key and say there's always a next time. Kieron has had disappointments in the past. He knows the gravity of where this might lead - or not."
The musical will be more demanding, physically and emotionally than the film, says Daldry. One boy must hold the show. "You can't blink. You can't slip. The success of the whole show rests on your shoulders."
Working Title and Old Vic Productions will be staging the Billy Elliot musical in Newcastle later this year and in the West End early in 2005.
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Billy Elliott (beyond the movie) (Read 35,380 times)
