Billy Elliot the Musical

A confession: sometimes I lazily assume that all long-running West End musicals are soulless corporate juggernauts unworthy of my attention. A revelation: 'Billy Elliott', one year on, is an electrifying, ballsy, compassionate and political show. Musicals tend to tell stories of individual triumph. It would have been easy for Lee Hall and Elton John's show to use Billy's individual ballet-dancing success to absolve his Durham community's wider distress in the midst of the 1984 miners' strike. But Stephen Daldry's production is as much about the community's struggle as Billy's. 'It's everybody's future, it's everybody's past,' as one lyric has it. 'It's not about a bairn who wants to dance.'

The show's even more notable achievement is to keep the miners' doomed campaign entertaining and inspiring, without soft-soaping it. We're shown the in-fighting, we're shown the narrow-mindedness - which leads to Billy being thought a 'poof' for harbouring dance ambitions. But we're also shown a group of working class people who look out for one another; a communitarianism that Thatcher (the butt of a gleefully abusive song) and later Blair (who crops up here preaching socialism - ho ho! - to a miners' welfare club) would do their best to destroy. What Billy says about ballet, one might equally say about the 'solidarity' of which his people sing: 'it's like forgetting who you are and at the same time something makes you whole.'

Meanwhile, Billy's story - notwithstanding the success of the film - has really found its medium in this musical. His whole journey - from hope through frustration to his dreams being realised - can now be expressed through dance. The closing sequence to Act One, when Billy's claustrophobia is manifested in a furious tap-dance directed against a wall of police riot shields, is awesomely powerful. Colin Bates is a spirited Billy and Philip Whitchurch touching as the dad who swallows his prejudices to support his kid. Perhaps Billy's cross-dressing pal Michael, singing 'what's wrong with expressing yourself?' in high heels and a cocktail dress, is stretching things a bit. But at least it's theatrical, and humane and funny, like much else in this marvellous British musical.