Photo credit: Joan Marcus

By Alissa Norby

Few institutions relish the restorative power of the arts like Broadway. The exploration of the adolescent development that catapults one from outsider to artist is certainly nothing new. Broadway conceivers have often busied themselves with the seductive stories of showbiz dreams, a diegesis that has entranced those onstage and off throughout the industry’s longstanding life force.

Yet few tales of artistic endeavor are as wholly gripping as that of the initial awakening, an oft tumultuous process that played source to Lee Hall and Stephen Daldry’s quaint 2000 film, “Billy Elliot”. The movie traced the terpsichorean trek of a young lad amidst political clash in England’s guttural counties, exploring the perseverance of expression in spite of impoverished odds. A wholesale musical incarnation of the piece, invoked by composer Elton John, achieved immutable success both on the West End and the Great White Way, seemingly proof that the lightning of even the more culturally-niched works do not discriminate between bottles.

And judging from Sunday evening’s Chicago premiere, Billy Elliot has pumped an even higher wallop of electric current into its spark plugs. While the sobering grit of the original film is largely eschewed for a Broadway brushstroke, the production manages to achieve a ballast pastiche that its siblings in musical kith often ignore. Beneath its husky festooning of the typical bells and whistles (Disney-inspired puppets make several appearances, an aspect of the piece that at times threatens with saccharine) the production sustains an unapologetic devotion to its unlettered denizens.

Equally infused with Brecthian verisimilitude and Ziegfeld panache, Billy Elliot’s astute creative team (a partnership between original film director Stephen Daldry, bookwriter Lee Hall, and John) never loses sight of its two dramatic objectives: to espouse the truth of cultural struggle, and to make you reach for the nearest pair of jazz flats.

It’s a canister rimmed of sugary sweets, but never one to shy from a pint of treacle. The musical follows the tribulations of a young man who finds he can release more passion with an arabesque than a boxing glove. His want of expressive outlet is transposed against Northern England’s 1984 zeitgeist, the admonitory period that pinned the union-busting Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher against the National Union of Mine Workers in Durham County. John’s understated, anthemic score marries with Lee Hall’s willfully unidealized book to showcase the interface between these two journeys, finding overlap in the fracases that define us. As Billy learns the consequences of the jeté battu, so do his striking elders of their own protestation to the status quo.

The truthfulness in its storytelling has always been the immortalizing root of Billy Elliot, a task that the wholly superb cast at the Oriental Theatre is resolute to embrace. Cesar Corrales, one of the four adolescent performers rotating in the title role, nimbly displays his physical virtuoso in every production number, most winningly in “Billy’s Angry Dance” and the second act pas de deux. Corrales approaches Peter Darling’s finely realized character-driven choreography with precocious insight into the emotional and political barriers that comprise the heart of the matter.

Both Daldry and Darling’s musical stagings are refined in their elocution yet galvanizing in vibrancy. Parroting the long-held theatrical concept of musical expression’s formidability at language’s stopping point, Daldry and Darling metaphorically- and literally- allow Billy’s thoughts to take flight as soon as they surpass their earthly tethers. The results are simply explosive.

Broadway veteran Emily Skinner imbues the hardened ballet teacher Mrs. Wilkinson with a deft tension of both survivor’s damage and sentiment. “Dancing is as much about discovering things about yourself as it is about discovering the dance,” she muses to her prodigious student, suggesting  that the physical art does not stop with mere pointe and pirouette.

As such, the preserving locus of the piece has never been that of dance, but rather the search for self identity and expression-whether it be with tights or torches- that endures in the most trying of times. Indeed, it is the ability to express that may be one of our most potent methods of survival in the face of this hardship. As the final curtain of Billy Elliot shows the coalminers physical descent into a vanquished economic future, a young boy heads off to professional ballet school to pursue his dreams. It is the creators’ way of reminding the audience of the pursuant nature of both devastation and hope, and to always dance, dance, dance through the battle.

Highly Recommended

“Billy Elliot” runs through October 24, 2010 at the Ford Center for the Perfoming Arts Oriental Theatre in Chicago. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit www.BroadwayInChicago.com.

For additional theatre news and reviews, please visit www.TheatreInChicago.com.