CDs: Electricity

Based on the popular 2000 film, the musical Billy Elliot is set in North East England, against the backdrop of the 1984-1985 miners' strike that divided the country and hastened the demise of one of Britain's major industries.

The eponymous hero is an eleven-year-old working-class lad whose father and brother are striking miners, and whose mother has been dead for two years. Billy escapes the harsh realities of his family life and environment through an unexpected gift for dance. It's a tale of how art can transform a life, set against the collapse of a way of life.

It's unusual that the musical reunites so many key figures who worked on the film. Back for the show are the movie's director, Stephen Daldry; its choreographer, Peter Darling; and its screenwriter, Lee Hall, who for the show has done both the book and his first-ever set of lyrics. The most significant new member of the team is composer Elton John, who fell in love with the film when he caught the first public screening at Cannes. John has, of course, already enjoyed musical-theatre success with two collaborations with Tim Rice, The Lion King and Aida, and will be represented this season on Broadway with Lestat, the latter with lyrics by long-time John collaborator Bernie Taupin.

In a time of spoofy, self-regarding musicals, Billy Elliot is a heartily emotional show that has the audience cheering Billy on in his quest for self-expression. The title role is demanding and difficult to cast, with the solution of having three young actors originally James Lomas, George Maguire, and Liam Mower rotating in the role and also covering each other. There are also two other principal children's roles, Billy's friends Michael and Debbie, that are similarly rotated.

Billy Elliot opened in May, 2005 at London's Victoria Palace Theatre to rave reviews, and quickly became a major hit. In The Telegraph, Charles Spencer called it "the greatest British musical I have ever seen." Writing in The Times, Benedict Nightingale called it "as strong a musical as the British theatre has produced" and said that it possesses "a substance, size, and majesty of theme we've been missing in recent musicals, British and American."

Even more significantly for its international future was the review filed by New York Times critic Ben Brantley, who described the show as a "concentrated dose of ecstasy" and "the first musical since Rent to exert such a complete emotional hold on its audience....You have to go back a long time to find a musical as thoroughly integrated, perhaps all the way to the first production of Sweeney Todd."

With such a review in the U.S. paper of record, it was inevitable that Billy Elliot would be brought to Broadway, where it's scheduled to open next year. But there has been concern over the show's transfer to the U.S., involving such problems as the show's thick regional accents, slangy dialect, and concentration on a specific period of British history and politics not likely to resonate as strongly with Americans.

The original cast recording features in the role of Billy the youngest of the three originals, Liam Mower, who also was the press-opening Billy, and was, by the time of the recording's release in the U.K. on December 5, the only one of the three original Billys still officially with the show. Mower is now rotating at the Victoria Palace with two new Billys; it has been said that the New York production may require only two rotating Billys.

Some critics Brantley excepted were cool to the score. But Billy Elliot appears to be a show that amounts to more than the sum of its parts. And on the evidence of the cast recording, the score is richly atmospheric and affecting.

John's music has traces of hymns, folk songs, rock 'n' roll, music hall, and show tune. The show gives greater importance to the strike than did the film, and, as heard on disc, the score is most memorable in its ensemble numbers for the miners, including their opening anthem, "The Stars Look Down"; their sharply sarcastic "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher" "We all celebrate today/Cos it's one day closer to your death"; and the late-second-act number "Once We Were Kings."

Otherwise, the best items are dance instructor Mrs. Wilkinson Haydn Gwynne's song "Shine," which dares to include the lyric "Give 'em the old razzle dazzle"; Michael and Billy's salute to cross-dressing, "Expressing Yourself"; and Billy's explanation of how he feels when he's dancing, "Electricity." And the two numbers featuring Billy's deceased mother are inevitably touching.

Needless to say, the recording cannot provide Darling's choreography for the first-act closer, Billy's "Angry Dance"; Billy's "Electricity" dance; the "Swan Lake" sequence, with Billy dancing and flying with his older self; or the big curtain-call finale, with the entire company in tutus. Then too, we can't see Daldry's staging of "Solidarity," which merges a ballet class with hordes of striking miners and police, or the oversize puppets of "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher."

But this is a vivid cast recording, running a generous seventy-five minutes, including a fair amount of dialogue, and making a strong case for the show. Mower is ideal, as are Gwynne and Tim Healy as Billy's father. For the recording, the orchestra has been augmented to include more than forty players, and it makes the score sound all the grander. Like the cast album of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Beautiful Game, the Billy Elliot recording comes with a warning sticker affixed to the front, "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content."

The deluxe edition now available in the U.S. from Decca Broadway includes a second, bonus CD, running ten minutes and offering John himself in attractive renditions of "The Letter," "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher," and "Electricity."

The recording does, at times, offer reason for concern over the Broadway incarnation of Billy Elliot. The accents can make the dialogue difficult to make out, and may need to be toned down for America. And it's easy to see how numbers like "Solidarity" and "Merry Christmas, Maggie Thatcher" could mean considerably less to U.S. audiences.

But as was the case with the original film, Billy Elliot possesses one of those irresistible stories that has the audience rooting for the hero from start to finish, and deeply moved when Billy leaves his home behind to take up a new life. So there would seem to be little doubt that Billy Elliot will thrive here.