Trent Kowalik and ballet girls in ‘Billy Elliot.’ Photo: Alastair Muir.
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By Jonathan Warman
Friday, November 07, 2008
BILLY ELLIOT
The new Broadway musical “Billy Elliot” has been hyped over the moon. The real story: The show is, yes, truly impressive, but something just a bit less than the “best new musical in years.”
Based on the indie Brit movie of the same name, it follows tween Billy, living in a small North England town convulsed by the historic British miners’ strike of the 1980s. Our hero stays after a boxing lesson, finding himself caught in the middle of a somewhat chaotic ballet class. Drawn in by the blowsy yet charismatic teacher, Billy slowly realizes he might have a real future as a dancer, while his home town falls apart around him.
It’s been often said that this is Elton John’s best score for the theater, and that’s true enough. Though there’s nothing here as transcendent as “The Circle of Life” from “The Lion King,” Sir John and bookwriter/lyricist Lee Hall have crafted multidimensional songs that evoke working class British culture in all of its brutality, sentimentality and soul.
Hall and director Stephen Daldry are adept at exploring the intersections between class, culture and gender identity, particularly though Billy’s friend Michael, a precocious, cross-dressing gay boy. Their number together, “Expressing Yourself,” borders on the surreal but ends up being giddy fun.
All good things. Still, the show feels a bit like a massive machine that only intermittently connects with the yearning ache that should be at the center of Billy’s story. When those connections happen—mostly, naturally, in the dance numbers—“Billy Elliot” is everything its fanatics claim, but those moments don’t come quite often enough.
“Billy Elliot,” 7 p.m. Tue., 2 p.m. Wed. & Sat., 8 p.m. Wed. Sat. and 3 p.m. Sun. at the Imperial Theatre, 249 W. 45th St., $41.50-$301.50, 212-239-6200, billyelliotbroadway.com.
ROAD SHOW
Here’s another show I wish were better. Stephen Sondheim’s much-anticipated “Road Show” keeps narrowly missing it. It follows the Mizner brothers—talented architect Addison and smooth shyster Wilson—throughout their lives, focusing on 20 years from the late 1890s Klondike Gold Rush to the Florida real estate boom in the 1920s. They chase the American dream through thickets of questionable morality and shaky judgment, now succeeding, now crashing to earth.
Even at a short 90 minutes, however, the show feels far too diffuse. We don’t learn anything from the meandering story of these long years that we couldn’t learn better through a tight focus on just one incident in their eventful lives. John Weidman’s book keeps hammering the same points over and over until they’re dulled.
The big plus here is a queer romance between Addison and pretty rich boy Hollis Bessemer, expressed through the lovely ballad “The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened,” which has more homo heart than anything else in Sondheim’s canon. The rest of the score, however, is thin echoes of earlier, more robust Sondheim creations. Way too much, and far from enough.
“Road Show,” 7 p.m. Tue. & Sun., 8 p.m. Wed. Sat. and 2 p.m. Sat. & Sun. at the Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., $70-$80, 212-967-7555, publictheater.org.
DIVIDING THE ESTATE
Horton Foote, who started writing plays around the same time Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller did, is still at it today at 92. His plays aren’t as tragic or melodramatic as those writers. Instead, he favors subtle, well-made, even quiet dissections of the ordinary people of his native Texas, such as his popular “Trip to Bountiful.”
“Dividing the Estate,” however, is not your typical Horton Foote play. This frisky, oddly bright comedy looks at a landed Texas family squabbling about who gets what part of the estate. Foote isn’t a master comedian, so the laughs in “Dividing” are modest. He is, however, such a master dramatic craftsman that the audience is steadily drawn into the high-stakes intrigues of these down-home folk. Plus, the subject of real estate is suddenly quite topical isn’t it!
“Dividing” almost feels like a TV movie, but I don’t mean this as a slight. By those standards, it’s well written, entertaining and even sporadically insightful. Not terribly substantial, but satisfying in its own way.
“Dividing the Estate,” 8 p.m. Tue. Sat., 2 p.m. Wed. & Sat. and 3 p.m. Sun. at the Booth Theatre, 222 W. 45th St., $71.50-$96.50, 212-239-6200, lct.org.
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