Billy Elliot – The Musical:Great Dancing, plenty of Glitz but little heart.

 

Great dancing, plenty of glitz but little heart and no subtlety.

It seems virtually impossible that the brilliant 2000 movie Billy Elliot, adapted into a highly acclaimed award-winning musical could become such an unmoving show.

But, despite some strong performances and the occasional – very occasional – touching moment, this touring production does little more than go through the motions.

The story of the motherless Geordie kid from a poor mining town, who dreams of being a ballet dancer, should tug at the heartstrings, particularly set against the backdrop of a bitter strike in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s.

At its core, Billy Elliot is both a tale of a losing fight to preserve a dying way of life and the inspiring story of reaching out to capture an impossible dream, all the while emphasizing the closeness of family and community.

It’s all there in the script, but this production pushes the rainbow glitz of the backdrops and has such foolish moments as hooking Billy to a Peter Pan wire (you can fly to your dreams, dear boy) and having male cast members don tutus over their overalls (is this gender blindness taken to ridiculous extremes or a sledgehammer to point out that ballet dancers and being gay are not automatically connected?) How much of Stephen Daldry’s original direction has been altered by the road company’s resident director Aaron Gonzalez is difficult to judge. All that is clear is that the concept is not working.

Other issues such as the odd mixtures of accents are bothersome. Yes, true Geordie might be tough for many North Americans to understand, but at least it would be pleasanter not to swing from Scots, to Irish, to Cockney to Yorkshire to indeterminate in one speech.

On the plus side are the fine dancing by Ben Cook (the Billy on opening night), the strong performance from Janet Dickinson as Billy’s rough dance teacher/surrogate mother and a delightful sequence from Patti Perkins as Grandma in the We’d Go Dancing number.

Added to this, such numbers as Born to Boogie are reminders of the show that Billy Elliot the Musical could be, if only it shared the passion that a young boy from a macho mining town had for dancing.

Billy Elliot the Musical continues at the National Arts Centre to January 6, 2013