“I always used music as my escape, just as Billy uses dance.”
The quote is part of Elton's quote, appearing in the Chicago Tribune, ahead of this week's Previews.
Elton, who was reminded of his relationship with his father when he saw the film at Cannes and cried, added:
“My dad never really came to see me after I had become successful. He didn't know how to be a good dad to me. My mum and dad married very soon after the war, when everyone was getting married, and they were so unsuitable for each other. My mum was really protective of me. But my dad and I never really got on. I reconciled with him later, after he remarried, and I took him to football games, when I was chairman of the Watford Football Club. But we never really clicked.”
In Billy Elliot, though, the boy's father comes to understand what the arts mean to his child. Billy mostly just wants to dance. His pop is the one who takes the profound emotional journey.
“That,” said Elton, “was what I wanted.”
Back in Cannes, the singer pulled himself together enough to show up at the after party. There was Stephen Daldry, Lee Hall and the flick's producers, a group that included Eric Fellner and Jon Finn. With the room agog at Elton's unexpected presence, David remarked that this movie — which was, after all, based on a performance art — would really work well as a stage musical. Everyone agreed, and before long, Elton was telling people he needed lyrics.
“I don't think Lee had ever written lyrics,” Elton said. “But when I worked with Bernie Taupin, he would write the lyrics first, then I'd look at them. I'd spread them out in front of me, and I'd sit down at the piano and the song would come. That's how I've always worked.”
So Hall, who indeed had never written lyrics in his life, started writing. “Elton works very fast,” Hall observed, from his home in London. “I'd fax him the lyric in Atlanta, he'd meditate for a few hours or something, and then, about midnight, he'd call me up and play me the song on the piano, down the phone. Then about five minutes later, he'd get with his band, and there would be a fully made demo.”
Making the movie had been tough — Hall had shopped the screenplay around the BBC and beyond. Finally, Daldry took the project to Working Title, of which Fellner is co-chairman, and helped them wrestle the movie into being for about 3 million pounds. But now, with Elton penning the score, raising the money for the more costly musical was less of a pain.
The politics of the show — with its implicit pro-union sympathies and overt criticism of Margaret Thatcher's conservative government — caused ripples. One song in particular, a dark satire called Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher, musicalises the miners' feelings about their nemesis.
“We all celebrate,” goes one line, “'cause it's one day closer to your death.”
“I played the score for this group of producers,” said Elton , chuckling. “One of whom was Cameron Mackintosh. He said, ‘You can't do that. You just can't do that in the theater.' I said, ‘Why bloody not?'”
It stayed in.
Other than the Wall Street Journal, which attacked the show's politics after the Broadway opening (“They said we were Karl Marx in a tutu,” muttered Elton), Billy Elliot has generally been seen not as a left-wing polemic, but as the story of a lad who wants to dance, and a father who must learn how to get behind him.
Albeit with the game-changing addition of songs by Elton, Billy Elliot the Musical was pretty much put together by the same people who made the breakout movie, who happened to have mostly come from the British theater in the first place. That's unusual for a screen-to-stage transfer. But in many ways, this all-British crew is far removed from the commercial-musical team. Their collaboration was born mostly at London's Royal Court Theatre, a citadel of new and experimental work, where Daldry served as artistic director.
“I compare it to people who fantasise about having a really successful restaurant,” Daldry says, “without realising that such a restaurant is dependent on you always being in the kitchen.”
Stephen and his team may be in the kitchen. But there's a boy out in the front room—or, rather, several boys splitting the performances. That has made Billy Elliot a much more complicated and expensive-to-produce show than its peers. There are four boys playing Billy in Chicago. They need tutors and wranglers. “And if they don't have constant dance classes to build their stamina,” says Finn, the producer, “they risk getting injured.”
There has been uncertainty about how long the show is staying. When it was initially announced, Finn said he intended to keep the show in Chicago for as long as the city wanted it to stay. But given its casting needs, Billy Elliot can't turn on a dime. And very early box-office returns were, in Finn's words, “a little scary … given the cost of producing the show.”
And thus, when the Toronto production was announced last month for February 2011, the idea of moving the Chicago cast to Canada (after a 10-month run) became a more comfortable option. That's still a likely scenario, but Finn says that if the Chicago box-office, which has been flying in recent weeks, really takes off after the opening, he could leave the show here and hire a Canadian cast. “We have about two months before we have to make that decision,” Finn said. “This show has always sold tickets based on word of mouth.” So far, that word-of-mouth has brought in some $380 million (some three times as much as the film).
The entire original creative team has been gathered in Illinois since January because the Chicago Billy Elliot is going to be different from New York, Australia and London (all of which had similar stagings). To a large extent, Chicago is the beginning of an international rollout that has been a long time coming. A second U.S. tour will bow in Durham, N.C., in a couple months. There's Toronto. And there is also about to be a Billy Elliot in Korea. With a Korean cast.
The Chicago version (which does not feature Billy's house rising up from an excavated basement, and has a number of new staging ideas) is to be the model for all of them. Future members of the creative team are in Chicago, watching.
“I've told Stephen he'll be selling Billy Elliot salad dressing before all of this is done,” Elton remarked. “There will be Billy Elliot soap.”
So Chicago is the beginning of something, but also the end. This is the last time the original team will put the show together themselves from scratch. (Daldry has been mentioned as a likely director of Dumbo for Disney, and if that happens, he'll surely be taking choreographer Peter Darling and others from his Billy Elliot team.)
The Illinois production begins previews March 18 and opens on April 11.
Tickets, ranging from $30-$100, can be purchased by ringing up
1-800-775-2000.
Above is Elton at the February 27 Face to Face show at Sprint Center in Kansas City, MO. He was pointing to Jeffrey Owen Hanson as he dedicated Crocodile Rock to him, saying:
