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It’s easy to roll your eyes at screen to musical adaptations, but when they work, they really work, as evidenced by 2005’s Billy Elliot the Musical.
Arriving just five years after the Stephen Daldry directed, Lee Hall-written film about a young lad from County Durham who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer at the height of the miners’ strike, Daldry and Hall returned with the addition of songs from one Elton John. They made for somewhat unlikely bedfellows on paper, but in reality the move to musical was an unalloyed success, with the medium allowing Billy Elliot to seesaw ever more wildly between kitchen sink northeastern life and full on fantasy.
It was a stonking success, running at the Victoria Palace Theatre for over a decade, finally closing in 2016 when the theatre had a refurb in order to accommodate Hamilton. It didn’t do too shabbily over on Broadway either, running for four years and winning a pretty incredible 10 Tony Awards. Billy Elliot also, by the by, launched the career of a young man named Tom Holland, who worked his way up through the cast to the title role over the course of a couple of years spent in the show.
It’s pretty good, basically, and now it’s heading back to London. Hamilton is still firmly ensconced at the Victoria Palace, so Billy Elliot will be heading to the Adelphi Theatre on the Strand, which is soon to be vacated by the departing Back to the Future the Musical.
There’s a little while to wait, though: the show will tour to Sunderland, Manchester and Edinburgh at the end of this year and start of next before it heads to the Adelphi. There’s no word on casting, though the nature of the beast is that the youthful lead actor is likely to be a star of tomorrow, not a household name already.
Billy Elliot the Musical will run at the Adelphi Theatre, Feb 12-Jul 31 2027. Sign up here to find out when it goes on sale.
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