Billy Elliot the Musical

He's actually an amazing dancer.

Obviously, he's going back to his dance roots after his breakout role in Billy Elliot on London's West End.

The espresso singer will play Ginger Rogers, Astaire's on-screen dance partner with whom he made nine films.

Qualley is going to play Adele Astaire, Fred's sister and his first major dance partner.

But Tom is a dancer.

He got his big break in that Billy Elliot production in London's West End.

If you're not familiar with Billy Elliot, it's a lot of dancing.

And then I think the majority of us found out he could dance back in 2017 when he did that lip sync battle.

Yeah, with Zendaya.

The show is set in the shipbuilding community of Wallsend in the northeast of England in the late 1980s, Thatcherite Britain, a period marked by working class devastation, the collapse of industry, the closures of the pits.

Uh, all of this having been talked about and depicted in various other musicals, not only Pride recently this summer here in the United Kingdom, but famously in the likes of Billy Elliot, the musical.

And dependent as these communities were on these industries, the devastation of their collapse, of their closure had a generational impact, and it's a really great and strong starting point for a story.

It connects to an idea about grief, this loss of something that isn't necessarily a person, isn't even necessarily tangible.

And I think about all of those other musicals that I mentioned.

I think about shows like Come From Away, and how you balance telling community stories with individual humanity.

I think about how you tell these stories of industrial action and major shift, and whether Billy Elliot fares better for depicting something small at its center with all of this progressing in the backdrop instead.

Plenty to think about, and in addition to my thoughts, I would love as always to hear yours.

But some people, some people... actually make a lot of money doing this.

Really? You know, when you have a Broadway show like Billy Elliot, okay, which is now run for how many years or Wicked, you know, some people do make a lot of money because they talk about luck.

Well, Dennis and Zach and I have some skin in the game because when we're 80, our children have to be successful because we're going to move in with

them.

Uh, before that was Tammy Faye, which started at the Almeida and then headed to Broadway.

But he was particularly praised for Billy Elliot and The Lion King and Aida.

And it's Aida that I'm featuring in fourth place on this list because technically he scored Lion King for the screen, and that was subsequently adapted for the stage, but he wasn't writing a musical theater stage score initially, in the same way that he was for Aida, which was developed for the stage.

So by some kind of a technicality, that is what I am calling his first musical theater score, and you can disagree with me.

roll the tapes

I'm not being so in England we have a very big culture of theatre so a lot of British actors whether you're talking Damson Idris or even Tom Holland who plays Spider-Man came up doing Billy Elliot yeah in the West End

It's a very

big

[upbeat music] So welcome back to Theater Dude.

I am Theater Dude, and today we're gonna be talking about Billy Elliot: The Musical, UK tour, West End.

Wow, it's gonna be great, Adelphi Theatre.

Right, they are gonna have the time of their lives with the cast and everything.

But first, what...

Shall we just go through what is Billy Elliot: The Musical? Billy Elliot tells the story of an 11-year-old boy growing up in a fictional northern English mining town during the turbulent 1984 to 1985 UK miners' strike.

Forced into boxing lessons by his widowed father, Billy secretly joins a local ballet class instead, where he, where dance teacher, Mrs. Wilkinson, recognizes his raw talent and prepares him for a Royal Ballet School audition.

Despite intense opposition from his father and an older brother, who view ballet as a unmasculine, as unmasculine, Billy's de- dedication eventually wins his father over.