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"  The huge advance sale for the Broadway incarnation of Billy Elliot, opening this month, is probably fueled by ticket buyers who remember the 2000 movie as a feel-good coming-of-age drama about an English boy from mining country and his dream of being a dancer. Or maybe they&amp;#039;ve heard the raves from London, where the musical, with its Elton John score, is still running after three years. What they&amp;#039;re surely not expecting is the gut-punching, violent, politically explicit experience that surrounds all those things. Billy Elliot the musical is a socialist fist in a Broadway glove. Partly that&amp;#039;s because the show is an hour longer than the movie, restoring much context that was cut during the editing of the film. And partly that&amp;#039;s because seeing miners and police riot onstage (or, for that matter, a boy drum out his frustration in tap shoes) is a far more visceral experience than seeing it spliced together on film. That makes the intersection of the two stories (Billy&amp;#039;s artistic emergence, the miners&amp;#039; crushing defeat at the hands of Margaret Thatcher) more painfully ironic; instead of agitprop, you get the compromise of people whose values don&amp;#039;t align. &amp;quot;Our socialist heroes are the ones trying to stop Billy from dancing,&amp;quot; says Lee Hall, who wrote the screenplay and now the musical&amp;#039;s book. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s able to go to his big audition only because he gets money from a scab. Every clich\u00E9 is met with a complication.&amp;quot; Advance chatter has focused on whether a show set among working-class Brits circa 1984 will be comprehensible to a 2008 Broadway audience, but musicals from Oklahoma! to Oliver! have always taken us to unfamiliar places where people talk funny. And as Hall\u2014who grew up in that &amp;quot;brusque, salty culture&amp;quot; and sees the story as a &amp;quot;fantasy autobiography&amp;quot;\u2014points out, the material is highly topical for Americans facing hard times and a possibly paradigm-altering election. That&amp;#039;s even truer now that it&amp;#039;s a musical, which by its lead-and-chorus nature highlights the interaction of individuals and communities. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s about something more difficult than escaping,&amp;quot; Hall says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s about whether one person can change the mind of the masses.&amp;quot; Onstage, and for better or worse in many political movements, they often do. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/music/reviews/a9370/dancing-around-25627/?click=smart&kw=ist&src=smart&mag=ELM&link=-SMT-ELM>