Based on the Academy Award nominated 2000 film of the same title, Billy Elliot is the story of its namesake star, a young boy in a depressed working-class mining town in the North of England. Set during the history-making 1984 miner’s strike, the show follows Billy, the youngest child of a blue-collar family that has recently lost its Mum, as he discovers his unlikely and extraordinary gift for ballet. While Billy’s father and brother take to the picket lines of the violent and life-changing strike, Billy secretly begins to study the art of dance with the help of a hard-drinking, chain-smoking local dance teacher. But as Billy blossoms and thrives, the world and lives around him continues to wither—and his only escape may be the prestigious Royal Ballet School, a place no working-class boy has ever gone, or been allowed to go to, before.