Billy's Gotta Dance. Does He Gotta Fly? By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

December 14, 2008
Billy's Gotta Dance. Does He Gotta Fly? By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

I SENSIBLY plan to keep my Christmas wish list pretty short this year. I'm asking for a return to global prosperity, and socks. I'm looking forward to the socks.

While I'm dreaming of greater blessings, I might add to my list the hope that someone will revoke little Billy Elliot's flying license. Before I'm accused of getting all Grinchy, let me state for the record that I generally share the high regard and warm affection that most critics have expressed for the wonderful new musical named after its dancing hero. Such is the high regard and warm affection most critics have expressed for this smash from London that you may have tired of reading encomiums to its glory. "Billy Elliot" is in danger of becoming so overadored and overrhapsodized that audiences may go in with unrealistic expectations — as if all thoughts of the financial downturn will be cured by the sight of a lad learning to leap — and risk emerging with a feeling of deflation.

You don't need to worry. The purity of feeling in "Billy Elliot" will surprise you into a reaction unpolluted by anything you've heard about it. As performed by a cast with unusual grit and quirkiness for a big show, the musical works with an honesty that few Broadway musicals can match. That's because it keeps its feet on the ground, emotionally if not literally, and pays more attention to the complicated reality of people's lives than the escapist fantasies that can be spun from them.

Which brings me to my Christmas wish. Amid all the moments that set my heart soaring in "Billy Elliot," there was one that caused it to sink into my shoes. It epitomizes the aesthetic conflict running through the production that keeps this very good musical from becoming a wholly great one, at least in my view.

It occurs near the end of the first act. Billy Elliot is the son of a coal miner, as you probably don't need to be reminded, who has chanced upon ballet one day at the gym where he is being taught (not too willingly) to box. An awakening stirs in his heart when he stretches out a leg and lifts an arm just so, under the tutelage of a curt, chain-smoking, tacky-outfit-wearing ballet teacher. In secret Billy returns to ballet class, and the promise of his talent inspires his teacher to seek an audition at the Royal Ballet School in London.

A new vision of life's possibilities takes hold in Billy's imagination. As he learns to dance, he opens his eyes to an enthralling future. And suddenly there sharing the stage with little Billy is a bigger Billy — the grown man and mature artist he has a chance to become.

Their dance together, on a dark stage, is among the most moving things I've seen on Broadway, all the more remarkable for the weight of emotion it evokes through theatrically simple means. There is just the music, the steps, the boy and the man. And yet the moment crystallizes what "Billy Elliot" is all about: the childhood need to dream yourself into a happier place; the exhilaration of self-discovery and self-determination; the scary excitement of the moment when you learn to listen to the truth your heart speaks, even if it is not the truth your parents (or you) necessarily are ready to hear.

But I've left out one participant in the proceedings. It's actually not just the music, the steps and the dancers up there.

There is also a winch.

Just as my tear ducts were ready to let loose, Stephen Hanna, the talented former New York City Ballet dancer who plays Billy's older self, stopped moving at center stage and grabbed a metal clasp that had quietly — but visibly — descended from the fly space. Trent Kowalik, the terrific young performer I saw in the role of Billy, joined him, struck a pose and — presto! — Billy was no longer merely dancing as if caught in a waking dream. He was making like Superman, or to use a more immediate comparison, Mary Poppins. He was flying.

Suddenly a moment of rare theatrical magic became an instance of familiar Broadway mechanics — and, it seemed to me, of cynical manipulation, one that marred a show that has no need to traffic in it. The audience eventually took the cue and began to applaud. But the ovation felt more dutiful than spontaneous. It wasn't until Billy had been lifted almost to the top of the proscenium and began spinning like a human ceiling fan that the audience gave in and performed the ritual that the moment seemed expressly designed to elicit.

I sat on my hands, thoroughly disheartened, resenting being brought down to earth from the emotional lift I'd just experienced. I should add that the flight wasn't manufactured for the Broadway production; I had the same response when I first saw the show a couple of summers ago in London. The musical's director, Stephen Daldry, is a gifted and intelligent man. The overall integrity of "Billy Elliot" attests to his determination not to sanitize or sentimentalize all the rough edges of the material. (There is rather too much about those striking coal miners in the show, which would be even more effective if it didn't stretch almost to three hours.)

But why couldn't Mr. Daldry trust the audience to be moved, even exhilarated by the unspoken feeling in the moment and the beauty of the dance? Why throw in the kind of glib crowd-seducing trick that for the most part the musical avoids?

As a ballet lover, I found the decision particularly aggravating. Here was a chance to awaken audiences to the appeal of a venerable and often marginalized art form, to show how emotionally resonant and theatrically potent the choreography of classical dance could be. But the show's creators decided to hedge their bets, probably assuming that holding the attention of the children in the audience would require the kind of gob-smacking feat that a diet of action movies and video games have programmed them to expect in entertainment.

"Billy Elliot" has a few similar blemishes, when funky dance routines grounded in reality suddenly morph into splashy, synthetically wowing production numbers. You can almost mark the moment when the characters are plainly no longer singing or dancing to lift their own spirits or express some emotional impulse but simply to give a sensation-hungry audience what it has come to expect from a "Broadway show."

The characterization of Billy's best friend, for instance, a flamboyant little fellow who seems to be channeling a disco queen from Studio 54, feels completely ersatz to me. "Sing it, sister!" he yelps absurdly to Billy during their comic duet, "Expressing Yourself." How, I wondered, would a boy from a coal-mining town in the mid-1980s acquire the vocabulary of a tart-tongued gay man more than twice his age, and for that matter from another cultural universe? I cringed, but the audience seemed to delight in this nod to anachronistic political correctness.

Musicals are hugely expensive undertakings these days — the budget of "Billy Elliot" is reputed to be somewhere near $20 million — and aesthetic purity is probably high on the list of expendables when it comes to their creation. Resisting the temptation to indulge in easy spectacle and crowd-seducing muggery is probably nearly impossible. The biggest hits of the last decade or so on Broadway — "The Lion King" and "Wicked" — are hardly small shows that shy away from the allure of deploying all the arsenal of effects the big musical has at its disposal.

With "Billy Elliot" the British finally have a global smash to equal the Broadway-devouring shows of Mr. Daldry's fellow Britons Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh from the 1980s. (The London-born "Mamma Mia!" is a smash too, but it derives its popularity from its familiar Abba tunes.) This show is welcome on a Broadway newly shadowed by the possibility of darkened theaters and plummeting ticket sales. But the musical is infected by the supersized ethos that followed in the wake of megahits like "Cats" and "Les Misérables." "Billy Elliot" is a small, heartfelt and keenly observed musical that intermittently feels the need to act like a loud, splashy, sock-it-to-'em crowd pleaser.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/theater/14ishe.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1229285777-0kSx2JxgxcApB0er/BsDvA&pagewanted=print

http://snipurl.com/84zkj