Reuniting the award-winning team behind the moving 2000 film and featuring the musical mastery of Sir Elton John, Billy Elliot shares the inspiring story of a poor, working-class boy who discovers his passion for dance as his family grapples with adversity.
Based on the Academy Award nominated 2000 film of the same title, Billy Elliot is the story of its namesake star, a young boy in a depressed working-class mining town in the North of England. Set during the history-making 1984 miner’s strike, the show follows Billy, the youngest child of a blue-collar family that has recently lost its Mum, as he discovers his unlikely and extraordinary gift for ballet. While Billy’s father and brother take to the picket lines of the violent and life-changing strike, Billy secretly begins to study the art of dance with the help of a hard-drinking, chain-smoking local dance teacher. But as Billy blossoms and thrives, the world and lives around him continues to wither—and his only escape may be the prestigious Royal Ballet School, a place no working-class boy has ever gone, or been allowed to go to, before.
"Billy Elliot does almost everything a musical should do, and more."
Time
Richard Zoglin
"One of the most electric, passionate and exhilarating shows to land on Broadway in years!"
Time Out New York
David Cote
"The best gift from Britain since Harry Potter."
The New York Post
Barbara Hoffman
"Seductive and smashing, with intoxicating, fleet-footed flashes of art and big, knock-'em-dead sequences. Elton John's songs are infused with the energy of joy."
The New York Times
Ben Brantley
"Expertly staged by Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot is dazzlingly choreographed by Peter Darling in some breathtaking dance sequences of various genres, from classical ballet to contemporary forms. The cast never makes the slightest false step, balletic, histrionic or emotional."
Bloomberg News
John Simon