and a mature dancer (Maximilien A. Baud), who is the embodiment of older Billy and the young boy's guardian angel.

If dance is king here, the songs - by composer Elton John and lyricist Lee Hall - play the role of subordinate prince. They are perfectly adequate as support for the movement but don't often rise above the category of by-the-numbers. (The evening's high point, in fact, is set not to John's melody, but to Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake.")

Hall's book for the musical, based on his screenplay for the 2000 movie (also directed by Daldry) is of a caliber somewhere between the dancing and music: Although it sometimes veers toward overt sentimentality, it never becomes cloying. Hall's kitchen-sink treatment provides the actors with guidelines for performances of earthy suppleness, particularlyin the cases of the appealing Leah Hocking, playing the flinty Mrs. Wilkinson, and the sterling Rich Hebert as Billy's rough-hewn father, who comes to terms affectingly with his son's unorthodox dreams.

Among the gaggle of talented children in the show, the charmingly manic Jacob Zelonky takes impressive advantage of the trickiest part, one that could easily congeal sappily into stereotype. He's Billy's friend Michael, a gay kid in a provincial place that doesn't readily forgive young people for being different.

"Billy Elliot" takes us to the fractious era in British life defined by Tory Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, whose Darwinian politics in the 1980s were characterized by some as coldhearted and by the trade union movement as apocalyptic. (She's represented by a funny caricature at a party during the