Review: 'Billy Elliot' a triumph of dance, emotion and storytelling

Images of Billy Elliot the Musical courtesy of Broadway in Chicago. .  

The show is a rivetting epic of everyday emotions told with unflinching honesty. And when words fail to capture the alternately soaring, broken and aching hearts of its characters, dance and music take over. That’s not to say that Lee Hall’s book or lyrics are at all inadequate – only that words always fail, both in real life and on stage. Some emotions are so strong they simply defy verbal expression. Anyone who has ever burned with passion, boiled with anger or wept in sadness (which is to say, everyone) knows that.  

Billy Elliot  captures all those complex, overlapping and overwhelming and just plain, old, ridiculously human emotions without a whit of schmaltz  or superficiality. It’s sentiment-free, yet it twists the heartstrings into knots, while delivering showstopper after showstopper. Such is the power of Stephen Daldry’s canny direction, and the components of a show that deserves a wicked-long – which is to say Wicked-long – run here.

The story takes place in a Northern England coal mining town during the iron rein of Maggie Thatcher. But for anyone who has been laid off, down-sized or otherwise taken a cold, hard punch to the gut from the economy, Billy Elliot might as well be set here and now.

Amid cinematic news footage, the stage fills with miners digging in for a long, angry, devastating strike. His mother dead, Billy’s home is scarred by alcohol and domestic as deeply as the landscape has been gouged by the mines. In a culture where machismo is all and to be a “pouf” the dirtiest, darkest secret a man can harbor, Billy’s accidental entre to the world of a ballet is reason for a sound smack upside the head. That the kid is extraordinarily gifted – obvious even in the tatty, third-rate dance classes sharing a gym with a boys boxing program – isn’t a factor to his enraged father and older brother. They yank him out, threaten his chain-smoking, fashion-challenged dance instructor and take their crowbars back to the picket line. 

When Billy secretly continues his lessons in order to audition to a prestigious London company, the plot seems set up for Fame Jr. But one among Billy Elliot’s many great strengths is its ability to defy expectations. (Although there is a sly Fame-homage worked into the costume design.) To use a (bad) dance analogy, Fame was a bit of barre exercises in Ballet 101. Billy Elliot is Swan Lake – only rest assured, you definitely do not have to be a balletomane to be wholly mesmerized by its drama and grace.

The miner’s strike and the audition loom with parallel force in Billy Elliot. The former is a matter of hopes, and dreams and passion all compressed into the small, volatile body of a prepubescent boy. The latter is the same, spread out over the tight-knit community surrounding that boy. The two are inextricably twined. As the scabs roll in and the cops grow more vicious, it becomes clear that even if Billy completely triumphs at his audition, that triumph will not staunch the wearying sorrow (and the near-starvation) that is breaking the back of everyone he knows. 

For all that fraught emotion, Billy Elliot is never cloying. Nothing here is romanticized. When Billy’s grandmother tears up over her late husband of 33 years and the orchestra swells into a delicately lilting intro, you fully expect a crooning tune of misty-water-colored-mem’ries and a  beloved husband. What you get is Grandma recalling how her life ended at 17 when she married a  drunk who beat her. Yes, he also took her dancing Saturday nights and that was her one bit of loveliness in life. But if she had to do it again, she’d stay single and drunk and dance whenever she wanted. With abandon.

Which brings us back to that dancing. Peter Darling’s choreography marries the art of physical storytelling with the thrilling, esoteric gorgeousness of ballet, tap, modern, jazz and all genres in between. Dance is the thing, as Billy says, that allows you to lose yourself and feel whole simultaneously. The magic of Billy Elliot lies in its ability to capture that beautiful dichotomy. 

Among the kinetic highlights:  “Expressing Yourself” celebrates unconventionality with humorous  straightforwardness and a razzle-dazzle anthemic flourish that deserves to keep eliciting mid-show (Jersey Boys-style) standing ovations for the run of Billy Elliot. It matters not whether you are or are not a prepubescent cross- dresser - you will be applauding their budding finesse by the second stanza.

“Billy’s Angry Dance” – so plainly, perfectly named – is a blaze of fury, the artistic version of putting your fist through a wall, exhausting, cathartic and balls-out amazing. Equally stunning is the 11^th hour “Electricity,” which has Billy exploding out of his inhibitions and fully, finally expressing himself in the song Walt Whitman sang. 

While Billy Elliot is the story of an 11-year-old, it never makes the hideous and common error of most shows centering on preteens. There are children at the center of this story, but they are not the sweet innocents of fairy tales or the precocious, perky, G-rated robotons of the Disney channel. Like real kids, they know cruelty. They are curious and blunt about sex and sexuality. They are fully living in a world that often deals them more than they should bear. Billy Elliot assumes the sophistication that children usually possess that adults often like to deny. There's nothing childish about it. It doesn’t shy away from harsh complexities. 

There are four boys playing Billy Elliot, and two playing the key role of his best friend, Michael. Opening night, Cesar Corrales, 13, turned in a phenomenal performance as Billy, displaying staggering technique, beautiful lines and the artistry of a dancer well beyond his years. Keean Johnson was infectiously charismatic as Michael, and movingly navigated one of the show’s most sensitive and delicate scenes of friendship.

We’re betting the other Billys (Tommy Batchelor, Giuseppe Bausilio and J.P. Viernes) as well as the other Michael, (Gabriel Rush) are equally excellent. We only hope we can get back to see all of them. The show really is that good.

Billy Elliot the Musical is playing an extended run at the Oriental Theatre, For Center for the Performing Arts, 24 W. Randolph. Tickets are $30 and up. For more information, click here or go to www.BillyElliotchicago.com.