‘Billy Elliot’s’ next leap of faith

London — Stephen DALDRY has long maintained that he tries never to repeat himself. Anyone who has met and interviewed Daldry over the years is likely to have heard his mantra: “It’s good to change.”

Though he was Oscar-nominated for directing his first two feature films, “Billy Elliot” (2000) and “The Hours” (2002), it came as no surprise that he chose not to follow up this one-two punch by directing another film. Indeed, he received flattering, lucrative offers from Hollywood to do just that. Instead Daldry, 44, one of Britain’s most celebrated stage directors in the 1990s, has returned to the theater. What is a surprise is that in doing so he’s repeating himself -- not once but three times.

The film “Billy Elliot” -- starring Jamie Bell as a preteen boy from a beleaguered working-class mining village in the north of England who tries to escape the limitations and prejudices of his background by becoming a ballet dancer -- is now a stage musical that opened here Thursday.

Daldry directs once again, while Lee Hall, the film’s screenwriter, has written the book for the show as well as lyrics to songs by Elton John.

“Effectively, this is three shows on top of one another,” says an exhausted-looking Daldry, sipping a beer in a Chelsea pub after a long day’s rehearsal nearby. What he means is that there are three boys who play Billy on different nights; British child-labor laws limit the amount of time an underage actor can spend on stage. Thus James Lomas, 15, George Maguire, 14, and Liam Mower, 12, all take turns in the starring role.

“Their vocal range is different and their dance character is different,” Daldry says. “One kid is much more ballet-based, another’s much more contemporary. So the music’s slightly different for each one, the choreography’s different. And it’s impossible for any of them to do more than three shows a week. They get totally exhausted.

“And it’s not just the three Billys. There are 17 kids in this show, so that’s three teams of 17.” The normally ebullient Daldry sighs deeply, his fatigue self-evident.

“It’s been quite a stretch for all of us.”

An hour earlier, in a high, wide, long room with huge windows, housed in what was once a military barrack, the youngest Billy, Liam, is going through his paces. Choreographer Peter Darling has suggested a dance break be inserted into a song called “Electricity.” Darling’s assistant, Ellen Kane, gives Liam direct instructions, while Daldry, in a tracksuit top and jeans, sits languidly on a windowsill, feet up on a radiator, observing quietly.

At one point Hall tiptoes into the rehearsal room clutching a piece of paper bearing a suggested rewrite for a scene.

Kane urges Liam to make a pushing movement: “It used to be hard, like you felt when you started doing the show....”

Darling: “But now it’s easier. You feel like ...”

Daldry: “... Superman.”

Darling: “Yes. Superman.”

Liam: (sings in a high, clear, unbroken voice) “Electricity sparks inside of me and I’m free, I’m free!”

He masters the new dance steps to everyone’s satisfaction, and Daldry has a few quiet words of encouragement with him. “Am I done yet?” the boy asks, then skips out of the rehearsal room for a bathroom break -- closely followed by a female chaperon.

“The three Billys are never alone -- while they’re with us, they’re accompanied everywhere,” Hall notes. “When they’ve gone back to their regular schools, they’ll find it strange that someone isn’t around, following them wherever they go.”

“We’ve been very lucky with these three kids,” Daldry observes. “They’ve been doing this now for 18 months. It’s a long haul for them. You take over their lives, and you take over their families’ lives.”

Spurred on by Elton John

The idea of making a musical of “Billy Elliot” was first floated after the film was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000. Elton John saw it, and felt it could successfully be transferred to the stage. So Daldry, Hall and Eric Fellner, joint head of Working Title Films, the production company behind the movie, flew to New York to meet John.

“He seemed more interested and serious than I thought he would be,” Hall recalls. “The question came up about who would write the lyrics and he pointed at me. And this was at our first meeting.”

So the Hall-John songwriting partnership was born. “I was open to doing whatever Elton wanted,” Hall recalls. “But he told me he can’t write without lyrics, so he sent me off. The best bit of advice he gave me was to write songs in order. I decided to write the songs first, without writing the book. That gave a shape to the whole piece.”

The songwriting was in two blocks. For the first batch, Hall faxed John lyrics to his home in Atlanta. “He’d write a melody a day, phone me at midnight and play it.” For the second half, the two were together in a London recording studio. “I’d bring in my lyrics and sit at the end of the piano while he created the tunes,” says Hall. “He worked incredibly fast. By the end of the afternoon he’d have a rough demo and his band would come in and work with him. We clicked. It was very painless. Quite early on, we ended up with 15 songs and created the show around them.”

Hall then proceeded to write the book for the show. He and Daldry agreed that the stage version of “Billy Elliot” should have a different emphasis from the movie. It places Billy more firmly at the center of a struggling community; the story is set against the background of the British miners’ strike of 1984, which becomes central to the musical.

“Theater’s more overtly political than film,” Daldry says, “so what you get a lot more of in the show -- and it’s partly thanks to the anthems Elton’s written -- is the sense of a community dying, of the mines about to be shut down, of the last gasp of a tradition.”

Still, he remained unconvinced that the story could make the transition to theater, until a successful workshop production in 2003 on the stage of London’s Old Vic Theatre. “After that I felt it would be hard to let it go and leave it to someone else.”

Fellner clearly remembers that workshop production. “Grown men were weeping, myself included. It had all the heart of the film, right there in its rough form. I cried my eyes out through the whole thing. We thought: ‘We’ve got to do this, doesn’t matter what it costs.’ ”

The occasion took Fellner back to the time when he and his Working Title partner, Tim Bevan, decided to finance the film “Billy Elliot.” “When Tim and I first read the script, we both said it made no sense at all on a business level, but we had to make that film. It’s so beautiful, emotional, such a brilliant story. That’s why it happened. If it had done no business it wouldn’t have mattered, we just wanted to tell that story. It wasn’t expensive, only 2.5 million pounds ($4.7 million).” The film proved popular worldwide, grossing more than $110 million.

Even if “Billy Elliot” is a beloved film, especially in Britain, preview audiences for the musical have not been deterred by changes made for its new incarnation. All three boys have known the thrill of receiving standing ovations from West End audiences; at one recent preview performance with George in the title role, the enthusiasm in the Victoria Palace Theatre was palpable.

Hall thinks he knows why. “The show, maybe more than the film, is very much located in the north [of England]. The humor and sentimentality sitting together cheek by jowl is very much part of that culture. It’s very located. We’ve realized it’s in a tradition of British popular entertainment, going back to music hall.”

The melodies written by John mesh neatly with this idea: One song sounds somewhat like a hymn, another like a folk song from the northeast, Billy’s hometown area. “I think people are surprised how little it sounds like Elton John,” Daldry observes. “There’s very little of what you’d expect Elton John to sound like. Instead, there’s this fantastic cacophony of different traditions -- including a pastiche of a Broadway show tune.”

Advance ticket sales have been brisk, but its main principals are waiting until all the reviews are in this weekend to gauge its future. Daldry would not be averse to taking the show to America, but insists: “This is a particularly English subject matter, although basically the story is ‘Cinderella,’ so it has its own universal theme. But I wouldn’t go down the route of ‘The Full Monty’ and put it into an American context. I wouldn’t be keen on that.”

A school for Billys

Meanwhile Fellner, half of Britain’s most successful film-producing team, has gotten a taste for producing stage shows. “It’s difficult, more difficult than I thought,” he says. “But it’s exciting. I can see why people get so attracted to it.”

Does this mean other Working Title films might be similarly adapted? “Notting Hill, the Musical,” maybe? “Love, Actually on Ice?” “Well, we’re open to ideas,” says Fellner, laughing.

For now the priority is to keep “Billy Elliot -- the Musical” up and running -- not just for the next few weeks, but for the long-term. Yet there is an inherent problem -- the three current Billys will have to make way for three successors after six months.

“They grow,” Daldry says simply. “The three we have now, we’ve had to change their costumes every six weeks. They’ve needed new shoes. They’ve grown even since tech rehearsals. So we have to keep replacing them.”

To facilitate this process, a “Billy Elliot school” has been set up in the northern city of Leeds under the supervision of Jon Finn, one of the producers of the film. Pupils meet for training in dance, acting and singing every Saturday and during school holidays. From this school, it is hoped that batches of three Billys will be produced, ready to take their turn on the West End stage -- as well as the young actors needed to take the 14 subsidiary roles. The next three Billys, who will make their bows in November, already know who they are.

“There’s also a wonderful twist,” Fellner says, “in that the three kids doing it now have a chance for their moment of fame, just like Billy Elliot. Then they’ll either succeed or fail like him. So they become the show.”