Tonight LL treated me to dinner with her parents (and their friends) and a ticket to the musical, Billy Elliot. If you don't know what the story is about, this kid in England is the son of a coal miner and instead of working in the mines or boxing (he's 11) he wants to dance. It won all sorts of Tony's, 10 I think, but we really didn't see why...unless it was a down year on Broadway.....sort of a tallest midget scenario....my apologies to my midget friends. The lead, who we are to believe is the son of his northern England parents is....get this....Asian. Yeah, the lead was a little Asian kid. The number of other Asians on stage at any point in the show? Zero. Sort of makes it tough to completely get into the story.
Anyway, what I found intriguing is the story of the coal miners in Billy's town. The strike in the UK was finally broken by Margaret Thatcher, with the help of some mines that were not participating in the strike and some that were run by scabs. I say "scab" only for ease as it would be tough to be more anti-union than me. Thatcher wanted to nationalize the coal mines and close the unprofitable mines. Those mine closures would impact over 30,000 miners. This part of the story wasn't clearly communicated in the play so it was a little confusing when the strike ended and everyone went back to work and they were unhappy after not working for a year. They were unhappy because the mines were going to be closed. On the Billy Elliot website, they have a timeline of events if you want something more abbreviated than the Wikipedia entry.
2 comments:
I heard a report on the BBC of another person who got stuck in a mine. Basically he said those people will never be the same.
I guess I'll stop feeling sorry for myself that the days are getting shorter now. You've put things in perspective for me!
The show definitely sounds a bit disappointing.
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