As recently announced, a Korean-language version of Billy Elliot is to play in Seoul starting in August.
In a telephone interview last week with the New York Times, Eric Fellner, a co-chairman of Working Title Films, which produced the Billy Elliot movie and produces its stage incarnations, said that the company was first approached about foreign versions of the musical about five years ago, just as the original West End show was starting up.
Mr. Fellner said that producers from Japan, South Korea, Germany and the Netherlands — countries where English-language musicals most often travel — all expressed interest before Broadway took notice of the show. The earliest foreign deals for Billy Elliot, he said, were struck in 2007 and 2008, including one for the production in South Korea.
Despite the details of Billy Elliot that are specific to British culture, Fellner said, “There’s been less resistance, with the few people that have seen it from those countries, to the themes of what it’s all about, than there was initially from Americans.”
He continued: “They somehow totally and utterly engage in the notion of community broken by government, economic depression, recession, unions. It’s kind of extraordinary how much they identified with all of the themes that the show plays on.”
Local actors have been hired for the South Korean cast, including a team of four young Billys, and some dialogue or other minor elements may be changed to suit the hometown crowd. But for the most part, it will remain intact, and the show’s American design and construction team has built the sets for the Seoul production.
Fellner said that a Japanese version of the Billy Elliot musical was being prepared for the summer of 2011, and talks were continuing with German and Dutch producers but nothing had been set yet.
