#it kind of makes the whole backstory feel less impactful to me because jackie found success

[antialiasis]

Billy Elliot

So in the wee hours of the morning of my birthday, I rewatched Billy Elliot, the original 2000 film, with Shadey.

It’s a good movie in its own right, but it also gave me a lot of added appreciation for the musical, which is a really good adaptation. I originally saw the movie sometime in maybe 2003 when it was on TV; then, in 2015, my aunt invited me along to see the Icelandic production of the musical adaptation, and sometime last year I watched the 2014 anniversary DVD recording of the musical with Shadey. By that point, I didn’t remember too much about the original movie, beyond the basic beats; I couldn’t tell exactly what had been changed or cut or expanded. Rewatching the movie after getting familiar with the musical was really interesting just to compare and contrast the two.

First of all, simply by its nature this was a really good story to adapt into a musical. The original movie already has Billy dancing as an emotional release on various occasions; since that’s not really a thing people do in real life in quite this way, these scenes feel a little weird and quirky, a touch of something almost like magical realism in an otherwise pretty gritty and down-to-earth film set during a specific historical event. It’s definitely a neat effect in the movie, emphasizing both how clearly Billy is born to be a dancer and the contrast between him and everyone else in the miner town. But in a musical, it becomes a completely seamless, natural emotional reaction. In the movie, the “angry dance” scene is interesting and works great, but it’s inevitably kind of goofy; in the musical, though, it’s a deeply powerful emotional gut-punch that is able to play itself completely straight because the musical context removes the quirkiness of it. The build-up is stronger, too: “Mum would’ve let us -” “Well, your mum’s dead!” And we go straight from that to the way darker, more rocked-out instrumental song playing and Billy helplessly screaming his rage and frustration and step-dancing furiously, to his agonized dance blending chaotically into the conflict between the police and the miners, sirens blaring, Billy screaming at the cops - it’s such a great, goosebumps-inducing scene and overall it blows the original movie out of the water.

Similarly, in the movie, Billy has a little, slightly awkward but resonant answer to “What does it feel like when you’re dancing?”, which concludes it feels like electricity, and it’s a nice moment of a bit of insight into how Billy feels about dancing. But in the musical, as Billy explains the same in the song “Electricity”, he suddenly throws his bag to his dad and starts to dance as Jackie stares, perhaps for the first time fully appreciating his son’s immense talent. Instead of a question asked after the end of his audition, his answer sort of seamlessly becomes part of the audition, actually showing off his skill and passion in a way that implies it’s what actually gets him admitted, and whereas Jackie couldn’t watch the actual audition, he can be a participant in this scene, which I think does a lot for the emotional journey of his acceptance and understanding of Billy’s passion for dance. In a scene that couldn’t originally include a dance in the same way - it wouldn’t have made sense - the musical can, and it creates a whole new interesting effect to it.

In terms of the actual story, the musical is really very faithful, more so than I thought. I didn’t remember Michael crossdressing or being psyched about tutus (only the later rooftop moment where he kisses Billy), so I had wondered if they’d sort of ‘gayed him up’ for the musical, but nope, that was totally in there (although of course, it’s a short scene in the movie and doesn’t lead to a major song and dance number about self-expression). Lots of the dialogue and lyrics are verbatim, or close to verbatim, from the movie. The musical streamlines things a bit, cutting out little tangential bits like Billy’s visits to the Wilkinsons’ house and Tony being outright arrested and replacing them with expansions of other elements: Grandma gets to be a bit more present and has a backstory expanding upon her simple, wistful “I could have been a professional dancer” from the movie, and the letter from Billy’s mom (another thing I didn’t remember being in the original movie, but it’s there and almost identical) is given a more prominent role, which it totally deserves, because man, does that play the heartstrings like a harp.

When I first saw the movie, I didn’t really understand the plot about the miners at all. I was a kid, I didn’t really get politics, I didn’t know anything about the history involved, and I’m pretty sure I missed the first maybe 15-20 minutes of the movie too; all in all, I didn’t remember much about that part of the movie, just sort of vaguely that there was this strike going on in the background and that Billy’s dad was a miner. When I saw the musical I was struck by how prominent that aspect of the plot was, and I assumed my brain simply hadn’t retained it originally, but actually, on a rewatch, the miner plot is mostly just the background to Billy’s story in the movie, whereas the musical is less fixated on Billy’s point of view and thus pays more attention to the struggles of the miners and their solidarity in the strike, lending poignancy to the sad, crushing moment at the end where we’re told the strike is over and they all have to go back to work. And I think the musical’s version of this balance works better on the whole - the kids’ limited understanding of what’s going on in the adults’ world still gets across, but it gives a bit more attention and sympathy to the characters of Jackie and Tony, and I think the musical does a more interesting job of deliberately juxtaposing and playing with the contrast between the vulgar, violent, hypermasculine world of the striking miners and the graceful, stereotypically feminine ballet. (See: the entire song “Solidarity”, which is the best song and plays these contrasts so well. Admittedly I’m not such a huge fan of how it’s staged in at least the 2014 live recording; I really dug the staging in the Icelandic version, which unless my brain is making things up had the police/miner confrontation parts being a lot more aggressive and violent (if stylized), then had the same actors seamlessly switch to ballet during the parts with Mrs. Wilkinson’s class. The staging in the 2014 recording makes more of a solid block of exaggerated over-the-top group choreography spectacle out of it, which I don’t think is nearly as effective at playing up the contrasts that are so beautifully conveyed by the actual song.)

There is one thing I think I do definitely like better in the original movie, though: I think the moment between Tony and Jackie after Jackie decides to cross the picket line to get money for Billy’s audition is more powerful there than it is in the song “He Could Be a Star”. In the musical Jackie starts off saying they’re finished and then repeats over and over that maybe Billy could be a star and they need to give him a chance while Tony talks about the strike and everything they’ve been through, while in the original movie Jackie starts off with Billy and only admits he’s lost hope in the strike as a counter to Tony, and the way he breaks down there is just stronger for me emotionally than the song is. I think I get what they were trying to do there, shifting the focus a bit and letting Tony articulate more of how important the strike was to them, but I think this may also just be one of those cases where saying something in song reduces the impact rather than enhancing it.

(I do think the musical proceeds better from there, though - the original movie kind of skips over how they ultimately obtain the money, but showing all the miners pulling together to help him is another good aspect of the added focus on their solidarity, and the way they ultimately end up having to swallow their pride and accept money from one of the strikebreakers for the sake of Billy’s future also has a sad poignancy to it.)

Also, the movie ends with an epilogue set fourteen years later, showing Jackie and Tony attending Billy’s professional debut in The Swan Lake. I’d completely forgotten about this part until the rewatch, but they meet Michael at the show, with a man implied to be his boyfriend, showing that as an adult he’s happy and out. In the musical, this epilogue is cut; instead, there’s a scene earlier on where Billy dances to The Swan Lake alongside an adult version of himself, implying that Billy does indeed go on to become a professional ballet dancer starring in The Swan Lake, and in some ways I think this is a more elegant way to convey that. However, this means that the musical doesn’t have the closure for Michael’s story that the original movie has; it simply closes with Michael heartbroken as Billy leaves town. That’s a bit sad, and I wish they’d found some other way to give him the same kind of closure.

But aside from those niggles, it’s a really good musical adaptation that in many ways refines and does a better job of telling the same story. Which, again, is not to diminish the original film, which was already good and does a whole lot of its own interesting things. But I find it fascinating to study how and why this adaptation works so well, hence this lengthy ramble.

(I may also have developed this weird characterization-crush on Tony. The scene just before "Angry Dance" may be my favorite scene in the musical. Tony is so incredibly, aggressivey, horrifically mean in it that it hurts to watch, and yet it's also so achingly clear that he's just lashing out because the strike is breaking him. He's just been in a brutal fight, the police are after him, his mind's been nothing but picket lines and scabs and an increasingly fanatical spiral of violence for months. The last thing he wants to hear about is that some people's biggest concerns are fucking ballet auditions. The way he uses Billy as a prop to beat Mrs. Wilkinson with while accusing her of being some kind of pervert titillated by watching little boys dance, only to simply redirect that anger straight towards Billy when he defends her, and engineering a 'victory' in the argument through transparent bullying, is so, so terrible and so utterly human. And meanwhile there's Mrs. Wilkinson being great and standing up to him, calling him a sanctimonious little shit and "Don't you lecture me about the British fucking class system, comrade." They're such real people in this scene. It's an expanded version of a scene from the movie and the expansion just nails it, but perhaps even more than that I like that it's recontextualized to be even more brutal and stressful for everyone involved, which makes it hurt so much more - Billy was actively trying to get to his audition, Tony’s just taken a beating and his face is bleeding, the police are coming after him right now instead of it happening after he's released, even Mrs. Wilkinson almost gives up on Billy after seeing what his family’s like. My heart.)