TOP PICK: Billy Elliott

Playing at the Imperial Theatre on W. 45th Street. The dance musical won an enthusiastic review from Ben Brantley of the New York Times:

"Your inner dancer is calling. Its voice, sweet but tough and insistent, pulses in every molecule of the new Broadway musical Billy Elliot, demanding that you wake up sleeping fantasies of slipping on tap or ballet shoes and soaring across a stage. Few people may have the gift of this show’s title character, a coal miner’s son in northern England who discovers he was born to pirouette. But the seductive, smashingly realized premise of Billy Elliot... is that everybody has the urge. And in exploring that urge among the population of a down-at-heels coal town suffering through the Britishminers’ strike of the mid-1980s, this show both artfully anatomizes and brazenly exploits the most fundamental and enduring appeal of musicals themselves.
It’s been more than three years since Billy Elliot, directed by Stephen Daldry and featuring a score by Elton John, first sent critics and audiences into a mass swoon in London, where it continues to play. The delay in bringing the show to Broadway hinted at fears that it might not sit comfortably on American soil.Adapted by Lee Hall from his screenplay for the affectionately remembered 2000 movie of the same title (also directed by Mr. Daldry), Billy Elliot is told in thick working-class accents and an argot that, even in London, necessitated putting a glossary in the program. What’s more, the show traffics in a particularly British brand of bitter treacle, wallowing in the glory of the bravely defeated and the pathos of small, trapped lives."

This report came from our good friend Steve Fetter:

"I have seen the musical three times in London and have tickets for Thanksgiving week in NYC -- and this from someone who very rarely sees a show a second time. It counterbalances the gritty life of miners in Northern England with a miner's son who has ballet talent but a hard road having it recognized within his blue-collar existence. Music and lyrics are superb, energizing, moving and touching -- count on tears at least a couple of times -- with British politics thrown in. And as one would expect, the dancing is a treat. My hope is that the language (must have been a couple of hundred four-letter words, because I understand that's how miners speak to each other) and the accents stay true in the Atlantic crossing -- I've read in the NYTimes that that is the intent."