Signature Theatre: Billy Elliot

I have been looking forward to this show for many weeks now.  When Signature Theatre announced their 2018-2019 season, this production shot to the top of to see list.  I am a huge fan of the movie, and so I placed high expectations on the musical.  Funny thing about high expectations, sometimes they are too high to surmount.  Save the young star of the show, I've also seen all of the other principles players in other roles.  They are all actors that I look forward to seeing.  So where was the disconnect?  I don't think that the show itself is very well constructed.  Furthermore, there isn't a single song that I could have told you about 60 minutes after leaving the show.  And it's not that they weren't well performed.  They were.  The music just isn't that interesting.

Other particulars, the staging was a theater in three-quarters round.  The floor was set to look like a old gymnasium basketball court.  The back wall as flush with a solid wall of old tin ceiling panels that concealed various openings.  Panels slid back to revealed rooms, doors, closets as well as allowing a few minimal set pieces to float out onto the stage and then away.  It all work fine.

As to the actors themselves, the performances were adequate with a few exceptional players tossed in.  The role of Mrs. Wilkinson was played by Nancy Anderson who brings a strong presence to the role, hit all of the comic marks fine and gave us a grand Mrs. Wilkinson.  Jacob Thomas Anderson as Billy's gay neighbor/friend was also a standout.  He grabbed the character by the horns and played Michael fearlessly.  The role of Grandma was a substitution, which I initially felt disappointed about because I was looking forward to seeing the cast actor in the role.  But I was not disappointed in Jane Petkofsky's version in the least.  One the of the magical moments in the show was her scene where she reminisced with Billy about her own youthful relationship to dance.  The other magical moment came in the day dream sequence where Billy dance alone with his older self in the empty gymnasium on Christmas eve.  The chemistry between the young actor and Grant Richards who portrayed the older Billy was palpable and endearing.  And let's not mince words here: Grant Richards is one gorgeous man with the body of a finely tuned classical dancer that allowed him for his part to embody grace in motion and inspire the same from his young counter-self.

Which brings us to our Billy.  The cast has two completely separate sets of younger actors.  Our Billy was played by Liam Radford.  Liam was amazing, and charming, and vulnerable, and confident, and hand me a thesaurus so I can get the rest of his adjectives in line.  In every way, acting, blocking, dancing, singing, and shear presence on the stage, he was Billy Elliot.
In the end this hasn't been the break out show of my fall season, but the flaws do not rest at the feet of the actors, for all the hype, Billy Elliot is just not that well constructed of a show.  I'll stick with the movie.