Archives for November 14, 2008

This was a two-musical week–I saw Billy Elliot on Broadway and Disney High School Musical at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, and didn’t care for either show. Here’s an excerpt from my Wall Street Journal review.
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Elton John, who fell flat on his face with “Lestat,” his last Broadway musical, is back in town with a show that promises to have a longer and considerably more profitable run. “Billy Elliot,” a stage version of the 2000 film about a coal miner’s son who longs to be a ballet dancer, opened in London three years ago and is still going strong. Small wonder, since “Billy Elliot,” seen from one point of view, has everything you could possibly want in a musical: It’s a Thatcher-bashing big-budget three-hour glamfest that makes tough-minded noises but ends up being a 20-hankie weeper.
The setting of “Billy Elliot” is the British miners’ strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing. This makes it possible for Lee Hall, who wrote the book and lyrics, to dish up a version that is–to put it very, very, very mildly–a trifle one-sided. In one of the fanciest numbers, a chorus of winsome miners’ children sings a festive holiday carol whose refrain goes like this: Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher/We all celebrate today/Cause it’s one day closer to your death.
Against this black-and-white backdrop of class warfare, we meet young Billy, a motherless 11-year-old kid who falls in love with dance, struggles to persuade his homophobic family to send him to the Royal Ballet School and…but you can guess the rest, right? Even if you didn’t see the movie, you’d have to be pretty slow on the uptake not to see the happy ending lumbering down the pike, complete with a kick line of miners in tutus who’ve evidently gotten in touch with their inner Busby Berkeleys.
Musicals, of course, don’t have to be surprising to be good. What counts is craftsmanship, of which “Billy Elliot” has some, and emotional truth, of which it has none whatsoever….
Two hundred fifty-five million people, I’m told, have seen the original “High School Musical” movie. Not being one of them, I can’t tell you how the stage version measures up, but Paper Mill’s production, directed by Mark S. Hoebee and choreographed by Denis Jones, is a slick and satisfying piece of work. Two of the performers, Sydney Morton and Stephanie Pam Roberts, are exceptional–I’ll be surprised if Ms. Morton, who plays Gabriella, the pretty math whiz, doesn’t make it to Broadway one of these days–and everyone else is both talented and likable. The sets and costumes are handsome, the pit band excellent.
What about the musical itself? It is, not at all surprisingly, an innocuous confection that gives the impression of having been written by a committee on a computer. The book is a sexless Mickey-and-Judy-join-the-drama-club fable into which the high-minded folks at Disney have shoehorned far more than their usual quota of public-service announcements for tolerance. (In the small world of Disney, tolerance is the sole and only virtue.) The kiddie-rock score is the work of 13 different songwriters, none of whom shows any sign of being able to write a catchy tune or a clever lyric….
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Read the whole thing here.
Watch my wsj.com video review of Billy Elliot here:

“Music is a parasitical luxury, supported by the few. It is something that must be inflicted on the public.”
Sir Thomas Beecham (quoted in Time, Apr. 5, 1943)