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November 16, 2008
Theater Review: Billy Elliot
Posted by Dave Blount at November 16, 2008 11:32 AM
Actually, I can't review Billy Elliot because I have better things to do with my time than sit through musicals about ballet-dancing coal miners scored by the ostentatiously homosexual moonbat Elton John. So I'll hand this over to Terry Teachout at WSJ:
The setting of "Billy Elliot" is the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which the average American playgoer knows absolutely nothing. This makes it possible for Lee Hall, who wrote the book and lyrics, to dish up a version that is — to put it very, very, very mildly —a trifle one-sided. In one of the fanciest numbers, a chorus of winsome miners' children sings a festive holiday carol whose refrain goes like this: Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher/We all celebrate today/Cause it's one day closer to your death.
Against this black-and-white backdrop of class warfare, we meet young Billy, a motherless 11-year-old who falls in love with dance, struggles to persuade his homophobic family to send him to the Royal Ballet School and … but you can guess the rest, right? Even if you didn't see the movie, you'd have to be pretty slow on the uptake not to see the happy ending lumbering down the pike, complete with a kick line of miners in tutus who've evidently gotten in touch with their inner Busby Berkeleys.
…I can remember — barely — when Elton John was still a good songwriter, or at least capable of writing good songs. That, alas, was then and "Billy Elliot" is now, and Sir Elton has long since turned into a pusher of faceless pop slop. As for Mr. Hall, his contribution to the show consists in the main of treacly doggerel (And you must promise me this, Billy/In everything you do/Always be yourself, Billy/And you always will be true) heavily sprinkled with four-letter words. That's "Billy Elliot" in a nutshell: It purports to show us a band of stalwart strikers who are fighting to the last to save their jobs, but turns almost immediately into sequin-spangled feel-good socialist kitsch.
The same degenerate liberal elite that gives us Billy Elliot as culture also treated us to Barack Obama as a president elect. Everything it touches rots into moonbattery.
Sir Elton, British knight, purveyor of high culture.
On a tip from Varla.
