Billy Elliot, the Musical

Last week we went to see Billy Elliot, the Musical in San Francisco.  The partner and I LOVE musicals but we are also very judgmental about them.  This was one that fell into the category of not so great, sadly.  We knew that they were doing rush tickets for $40 each (which is a lot for rush), so I was there early enough to grab some of those.  We also heard that the show was closing a month early and canceling the rest of its national tour.  Even after hearing all of this we decided we still had to see it, it won the Tony for Best Musical two years ago so there must be something good about it, right?

Well there wasn't much.  There weren't very many good singing numbers and besides Billy and a few other select leads the dancing wasn't even that good (wasn't this suppose to be all about the dancing?).  The overall show didn't really go anywhere either.  It wasn't really a drama and it wasn't quite funny enough to be a comedy, which just left us feeling very blah.  The accents were awful and some of the characters were pointless.  But none of these were the worst part.

The worst part was that this musical beat out Next to Normal for best musical that year.  I saw Next to Normal a few months ago (see here).  And it was one of the best musicals I've seen in a while, not to mention one of the few original musicals* to come out in the past few years and has some really great music.  Now that I've seen both musicals I feel like I can sufficiently judge them and confidently say that Next to Normal was by far the superior musical and definitely got snubbed at the awards.

Ok done complaining. I don't recommend spending the money to see Billy Elliot (even if its $40 rush), there are much better musicals out there and I will happily recommend one if you ask :)

And now my crappy TV shows are over and I've finished drinking the rest of the wine out of the bottle (classy, I know) so that's all for tonight!

*I really wanted to link this to the song "Original Musical" from title of show, but couldn't find it on youtube so here's a great montage from that show.