One Sentence Summary: Young boy in a small mining town in England during the 80s discovers a love for ballet, creating friction with his family's narrow world view.
Trivia: Four boys share the lead role and rotate nightly. Elton John wrote all the music, and was the driving force behind the movie being turned into a musical, after being brought to tears at the premiere. The guy who wrote the movie also adapted it for the stage, and even wrote the lyrics for Elton John's music.
Best thing about it: The entire show is brought to life through dance. It's daring, and artistic. The result is an understated performance that epitomises what I always say makes great theatre: you couldn't possibly pull it off any other way but on a stage.
What they could change: This was almost a 10/10, but a few times in Act II, the show plays for laughs. That's the kind of thing you laugh along with in Legally Blonde, but this show needs to give it's audience more credit than that. Luckily, the majority of the time it does.
We left thinking: "That's theatre at it's best. How on earth did they find four boys who can do that!"
Rating: 9.5 / 10
There are actually four boys that play billy not three.
ReplyDeleteThey auditioned thousands of boys for the role of Billy, and sometimes spent years training them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for linking to my blog from your forum. I was actually referring to the number of boys that they were originally seeking (three), not the number that are currently in rotation (four), but I've amended the reference.
ReplyDeleteI'm familiar enough with the show to know all the hard work they put in to finding and training the boys, but I was impressed all over again when I saw the show in person.