MUSICAL THEATRE REVIEW:
BILLY ELLIOT The Musical
2 MAR/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 5 out of 5

Decades after the Orangemen surrendered the streets of Hogtown to a vision more attuned to the growing multicultural pulse, Toronto is once again hailing the virtues of good King Billy. Not Billy as in William of Orange and his consort Mary, mind you, but rather Billy Elliot, the young working class hero of both the 2000 movie that bore his name and the subsequent stage musical it spawned.

And as everybody knows, BILLY ELLIOT The Musical opened at the Canon Theatre Tuesday, an event that even the much-hyped presence of Sir Elton John (who wrote the music for the stage adaptation) and his Toronto-born consort, executive producer David Furnish, failed to overshadow. Indeed, BILLY ELLIOT The Musical proves to be quite the little conqueror. For even though John garnered the first standing ovation of the evening, it certainly was not the last. An opening night audience overcame characteristic Toronto reserve on several occasions to hail the handiwork, not just of the composer, but of Lee Hall’s stage adaptation of his own movie script and of director Stephen Daldry’s realization of that adaptation.

But mostly, those ovations were for Billy Elliot, played on opening night by young Cesar Corrales (sharing the role with Myles Erlick, Marcus Pei and J.P. Viernes) and for his feel-good story. It is, of course, the story of a young man with a passion for dance, told against the backdrop of the worst of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, as the Iron Lady fights to the death with her nation’s coalminers.

Billy’s dad (Armand Schultz) and his older brother (Patrick Mulvey) are two of those miners, and with a few hundred thousand of their union brothers, they are on strike as the play opens, fighting desperately to preserve not just their livelihoods but their way of life as well. While they struggle to do that, however, Billy dreams only of dancing — a dream fostered by Mrs. Wilkinson, the pragmatic local dance teacher (played to perfection by our own Kate Hennig) who refuses to let the working class Geordie prejudices of young Billy’s family stand in the way of her young pupil’s dreams.

In the world of stage adaptations, this particular one flies in the face of a conventional wisdom that suggests a story has to be pared back for the musical stage. Instead, Hall et al expand their back story — Thatcher vs. the working man — to a point where it almost rivals Billy’s own, underlining in the process, the redemptive power of art and of hope, even while they threaten to over-balance it all and bring it down like a house of cards.

But if the story itself seems to career dangerously on occasion between the personal and the political, the poetic and the profane, Daldry nonetheless manages to keep the focus on young Billy and his dream — a task rendered much easier by the quality of young Corrales’ performance. As a dancer, he delivers even the most demanding of Peter Darling’s choreography in flawless terms, his acting so focused he even convinces us he’s a fine singer.

Happily, Corrales isn’t the only talented youngster on the Canon stage, for Daldry has surrounded him with a bevy of multi-talented kids, led by a hugely likeable Dillon Stevens, who turns the cross-dressing Michael into one of the least sexually confused kids in the show. As far as diction goes, Daldry walks a fine line too, juggling the all-but-impenetrable Newcastle dialect with the need for it to be understood. While he seems to recognize that finally the rough-hewn blue collar British sensibility is as important here as it was to BLOOD BROTHERS (a musical which coincidentally finds the occasional echo here), one wishes he would realize that simple volume is not always the solution.

Interwoven through it all, of course, is John’s music, a pastiche that embraces everything from stirring anthems to touching ballads with the occasional charming but forgettable stop along the way. And while it may seem on occasion a tad overstuffed, clocking in at around the three-hour mark, in the final analysis, it proves that if a musical’s heart is in the right place — which is right up there on stage — it is possible to forgive just about anything.

So all hail King Billy, and long may he reign.