Billy Elliot Tickets:43 recommendations

Award winning musical based on the hit 2000 film 

About Billy Elliot 

With a book and lyrics by Lee Hall who wrote the screenplay for the film, the stage adaptation of Billy Elliot has only been enhanced by a score from Elton John. Naturally, the musical is longer than the film, and this allowed for more emphasis on the miners’ crisis of 1984-85 than in the film. When this is contrasted with Billy’s struggle for both freedom of self expression and acceptance, it makes for an exhilarating and emotionally involving theatre experience. This also meant that the stage show has a darker, harder edge than the film, and contains much of the same strong language and violent scenes, meaning that Billy Elliot is quite unsuitable for young children.

Billy Elliot opened at the Victoria Palace Theatre in March 2005 and the press uniformly heralded the new show with its sensational dance sequences (choreographed by Peter Darling who also worked on the film), its drama and its sensitive handling of delicate issues.

In 2006, Billy Elliot won six of the nine Olivier awards it had been nominated for, marking the first time that the Best Actor in a Musical title was awarded in a shared capacity, to the three boys who shared the show’s title role. One of the boys, Liam Mower, was also the award’s youngest ever recipient. The show’s success has also gone global. The Australian production opened as recently as December 2007 and has already one the title of Best Musical Sydney Theatre Awards.

Billy Elliot is scheduled to open on Broadway in September 2008 and productions are also currently being developed in Canada, Japan and Germany. 

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