Billy Elliot leaps back onto stage in Birmingham

“It was such a bad pitch – we’d say look, it’s about a kid who wants to be a ballet dancer set against the miners’ strike, and you could just see people slump in their chair and say really?”

Those were the words of Jon Finn, the original producer of the 2000 film and also of the stage adaptation that returns to Birmingham for an eight week run starting on Tuesday.

When working for Universal Pictures, Billy Elliot was the first script Jon read as a producer at the company.

He said: “It’s one of the only scripts that’s made me laugh and cry, certainly the only script that’s made me cry.”

The touching plot of the film also struck a chord with Sir Elton John, who after seeing the film said “it had to be made into a musical” – of which he then created the music for.

Jon said: “And so Elton rang everybody and said we’re going to turn it into a musical and everyone was saying ‘can you imagine how bad that’s going to be? Tap dancing miners – nobody needs that’.

Jon – who shot the film at Easington Colliery, where his grandfather had worked as a miner – said he had no idea the film would be such a big hit and would take over the next decade of his life.

He said: “I’m rather proud that I’m probably the last person in my family that’s still making money out of the coal industry.”

First staged in 2005 at London’s West End, the musical has been seen by more than 10m people worldwide and has collected 80 awards along the way.

“The thing about the live show compared to the film, is that the kid has actually got to do it in front of you so you can’t fake it, he can either do it or he can’t do it, it’s either amazing or it’s not.”

When watching the show at a Billy Elliot workshop, even producer Jon Finn – who had seen the film over 100 times – said: “I thought so many times there was nothing about Billy that could ever move me again, but there was something about this kid actually performing in front of me that I felt completely moved and it moved me again.”

Jon added: “That’s the thing that makes it special – asking what we ask these kids to do is immense, the director always said it’s like performing Hamlet and doing a marathon at the same time and it has that quality about it because you’ve literally got this kid on the stage for three hours and he holds the whole performance.”

Click here to sign up to receive our new South West business news...
Close