DidHeLikeIt.com Reviews, or: Electricity seems to hold over from London for BIlly Elliot

Here is a collection of critic capsules from DidHeLikeIt.com for Billy Elliot - The Musical, which opened last night at the Imperial Theatre after starting previews October 1st.










NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW: "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, which opened Thursday night at the Imperial Theater, is that everybody has the urge. And in exploring that urge among the population of a down-at-heels coal town suffering through the British miners’ strike of the mid-1980s, this show both artfully anatomizes and brazenly exploits the most fundamental and enduring appeal of musicals themselves."


USA TODAY REVIEW: "Sure, this adaptation of the 2000 film about a coal miner's son struggling to realize his dreams of ballet glory is already an established hit in London. There, its plot — set in Northern England in the 1980s, when those in Billy's dad's line of work were doing battle with Margaret Thatcher — resonated with audiences accustomed to a more rigid class structure and thus less likely to take social mobility for granted."




THE ASSOCIATED PRESS REVIEW: "It's not often that a musical comes along that is as ambitious as it is emotional — and then succeeds on both counts. But Billy Elliot, which opened Thursday at Broadway's Imperial Theatre, is an exceptional work that exemplifies what the best musicals are all about: collaboration. Everything comes together in this impressive, warmhearted adaptation of the 2000 British film about a North Country coal miner's young son who yearns to dance and join the Royal Ballet School in London."




AMNY REVIEW: "Billy Elliot: The Musical is the real deal: a truly compelling and absolutely spectacular theatrical experience destined to be a smash hit. Easily the best British musical since Les Miz, it feels appropriate that it is playing at the Imperial Theatre, once home to that long running musical. Simply put, you cannot miss it."




VARIETY REVIEW: "Three-and-a-half years may seem a long time for an instantaneous London smash like Billy Elliot: The Musical to cross the Atlantic, but the delay looks to have played serendipitously into the producers' hands. With unemployment figures soaring and the economy in the dumps, the zeitgeist could hardly be more attuned to the stirring story of a Northern England miner's son liberated from bleak reality by his passion for ballet. But even without that happy accident of timing, American audiences would have no trouble connecting with the universal sentiment of this bittersweet dual celebration of community and individuality."