ON YOUR TOES.(Billy Elliot)(Theater Review)

Bannered across the poster for London's new hit musical "Billy Elliot" (at the Victoria Palace)--a collaboration between two of the country's mightiest showmen, the director Stephen Daldry and the composer Sir Elton John--is an unbuttoned quotation from the usually buttoned-down British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. "The greatest British musical I have ever seen," it says. What, I wonder, are the other great British musicals? "Salad Days"? "The Boy Friend"? "Cats"? The British love musicals; they just don't do them very well. The problem, it seems to me, is spiritual. The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity--the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it.

"Billy Elliot" is fascinating because it situates itself precisely on the cultural fault line between the two traits. The scarcity depicted here is the 1984 miners' strike--a brutal yearlong losing battle that the miners of Yorkshire waged against Margaret Thatcher and the Tories, who felt that the pits weren't economically viable, and were determined to break up the all-powerful miners' union. Abundance appears in the form of the eleven-year-old Billy, who is as impoverished as the next striking miner's child but who turns out to be rich in talent. "All out together / All out as one," the miners sing as they are called out on strike, but Billy's gift sets him apart from his embattled community and, for a while, from himself. Billy wants to dance, not demonstrate. He starts off as a nonentity and ends up, in our eyes at least, a star. (The musical might as well be called "Coal Diggers of 1984.")

Both the film version, which was nominated for three Academy Awards in 2001, and the stage version of "Billy Elliot" have touched people. When a story gets at something elemental in the dream life of its audience--here it's the longing to discover your desire and to seize your destiny--narrative vulgarities are often overlooked. This, it seems to me, explains how a show with a mawkish, melodramatic book, and without a single memorable melody or lyric, could have worked its way so deeply into the public imagination. The team that made the movie also made the musical, and therein lies the problem: it's a first for both Daldry and his screenwriter, Lee Hall, who wrote the book and the lyrics for the show. Ordinarily, putting a musical into the hands of novices would be a recipe for disaster; in this case, it's a recipe for a muddle masquerading as a major event. The show has every right to call itself a commercial hit, but no right, I think, to call itself excellent.

"Billy Elliot" begins with postwar footage of a speaker at an annual coal miners' gala invoking "this new adventure" of nationalization and "the great experiment of socialism." The curtain rises forty years later as that socialist dream is turning to disappointment. Onstage, the strikers, who are black-and-white caricatures of commitment, seem literally to emerge out of the documentary, weighed down by historical fact and coated in the impasto of slogans. By contrast, both physically and psychologically Billy wants to take flight. The musical never properly melds the two dimensions of air and earth, of Billy and the miners. By nature, the musical genre deals with fantasy, not fact; it is at its most political when it delivers pleasure, not dogmatic persiflage. Hall doesn't seem to understand this, and his prolix, repetitive book quickly loses its way. When the miners are the issue--and their story eats up a fair portion of the saga--the musical stalls; the proletariat here really are lumpen. When Billy dances, however, everything comes alive.

On the night that I saw the show, Billy was performed by the hardworking James Lomas (he alternates in the role with Liam Mower and George Maguire), a confident and handsome teen-ager who is well able to convey Billy's sensitive soul, trapped in a stultifying macho world. Dance allows Billy both to ...