By Joe Stead www.steadstylechicago.com

Have you ever perused the program for a local play or dance performance and wondered if you were seeing a star of the future?  It has happened a few times for me.  Emily Skinner is one prominent example.  Emily and I grew up in the same town (Richmond, Virginia) around the same time.  While she was a veteran of stage performances at local theatres around town from the age of 8, I was learning my craft as a theatre reviewer for my own homemade monthly "zine" called Curtain Up and volunteering at some of those theatres.  Flash forward a few decades and the honey-haired ingénue I remember from my youth is now a Tony Award nominated star of such Broadway musicals as "Side Show," "The Full Monty" and "James Joyce's The Dead".  When I learned that Emily had been cast as Mrs. Wilkinson, the coveted role of the dance teacher and mentor in the Chicago company of "Billy Elliot the Musical," I couldn't wait to catch up on some old memories and congratulate this talented veteran performer on her great success.  I was elated to meet with Emily during a recent break from rehearsals for the show, which begins previews March 18 and opens April 11 at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre.

As a former child performer and current teacher in New York City, Emily Skinner brings real life experience and understanding to the role.  She was not a shoo-in, however, and she reveals that the show's creators initially felt she was too young for the role.  "I had been seen for it originally when they first started casting the New York production.  They looked at actresses in the U.S. and they ultimately brought over (stage original Haydn Gwynne) from London to do it, but I sort of got down to the wire for the New York production.  I think in retrospect, although he didn't say it out loud to me, one of (Director) Stephen Daldry's issues with me was he thought I was too young for the role.  Now I have a couple more years on me and when it came back up they remembered me."

The irony of this former child performer now playing the teacher of a children's ballet class is not lost on Emily.  "It does feel like Déjà vu," she admits.  "In the show I teach a class of ballet girls and I see a lot of myself in those girls.  It's fun.  For many of them, this is the first time they have ever done 8 shows a week, which in itself is not for sissies.  It really is a job and you have to figure out a way to keep it spontaneous and fresh.  That's not easy to do when you're a savvy professional much less a little kid". 

As the Rodgers and Hammerstein lyric once observed, "When you become a teacher, by your pupils you'll be taught," and this teacher readily admits she is learning a lot from her young charges.  "I'm learning to see things freshly, how they keep finding the joy and the fun in everything.  We sort of forget about that as adults."  Although a seasoned veteran of the stage, when asked her favorite aspect of theatre, she explains that she now finds teaching more fulfilling than performing.  "I really love it.  It makes me feel useful in a way sometimes I don't get to feel doing 8 shows a week.  I also feel in my 20 plus years of doing this professionally I have gleaned a few things and it's nice to feel I can pass those things on".  In her role as Mrs. Wilkinson, she gets to do it all.

For those who may have been living in outer space the past decade, "Billy Elliot" has been named the best musical of the decade by Time Magazine, adding to the show's already prestigious shelf of awards and critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic.  It celebrates the love of dance against the setting of Northern England during the historic miners' strike of the 1980's as a young boy's unexpected aptitude and passion for dance blossoms against the odds.  A whole generation of Billy Elliot's, in fact have grown up since the musical version of the 2000 film made its debut on London's West End. 

The physical and emotional demands of the title role are enormous and have prompted something of a cottage industry of training and turning out talented tykes who can dance like Baryshnikov and also act and sing Elton John's score.  The Broadway and London productions each employ a trio of lads who alternate the role, while the latest Chicago company, the fourth including Australia, offers four.  Casting a character on the cusp of puberty can be a dangerous thing, and indeed one of the pre-requisites for the role is that the children's voices stay unchanged.  Once they have outgrown their spot in the limelight, there will be a whole fleet of new Billy's waiting in the wings.

The four boys who are playing Billy in Chicago, Tommy Batchelor, Giuseppe Bausilio, Cesar Corrales and John Peter (J.P.) Viernes reflect not only an impressive diversity but also the great geographic distances the show's producers have gone to cast the role.  Each boy gets to do two shows a week, and as Emily points out, "The role is so huge, he's on stage the entire show.  It's mammoth, with 19 enormous dance numbers, so you couldn't have a boy do more than two shows a week or they would collapse.  Watching these boys rehearse reminds me of being a kid when it all felt so new and exciting.  My goodness, they are being asked to do things I can't imagine a normal kid being asked to do.  It's extraordinary."

Emily started performing in community theatre productions at Dogwood Dell, a popular summer amphitheatre in Richmond, Virginia.  From there, she went on to do plays and musicals at such venues as Theatre IV, TheatreVirginia, Swift Creek Mill Playhouse and the Haymarket Dinner Theatre.  She was one of the original "Byrdettes," a local version of New York's Radio City Music Hall Rockettes that performed at the beautiful vintage movie house the Byrd Theatre.  "It was a blast," she recalls.  "I remember our crazy sparkly costumes and a wonderful director/choreographer named Randy Strawderman who choreographed it." 

I surprised Emily with another memory from a production of Neil Simon's "Biloxi Blues," which was produced by Theatre IV and which featured Emily in the role of Daisy Hannigan.  The program, which I still have in my collection, says "Her current project is finding a date for the prom - she graduates from Richmond Community High School in June".  I not only reviewed the production, but also worked as a volunteer at Theatre IV, and shared my memory of an intimate rehearsal for the show when Emily worked on her first stage kiss.  Even she didn't remember that little moment as we laughed and reminisced.

Another significant landmark in her career was playing one half of the real-life so-called "Siamese twins" in the Broadway musical "Side Show," which netted her and co-star Alice Ripley a joint Tony Award nomination.  "Side Show was a wonderful experience, mainly because we got to be a part of the creative process, both Alice Ripley and myself.  We did readings and helped develop it through a full workshop before it ever reached Broadway, where they really shaped the show and we got to help do it.  They created things around us, songs based on ideas we had and moments based on impulses we found in improvisation.  It was gratifying to perform.  Often times you're asked to do exactly what (the creators) want and you don't have much say within it.  A piece that allows you to create new work is about as gratifying as it gets as a performer."

For "Billy Elliot," Emily says there is a definite framework and "track" each performer must work within.  "The show is very technical.  Of course, each boy is radically different in they each have their own personality and strengths and weaknesses as performers and dancers.  But ultimately the show has to remain the same each time in order for it to be consistent.  It's been worked out beat by beat, moment by moment, so technically it can remain consistent each time.  Even the boys, within their own personalities, play it exactly the same to those technical beats.  To a degree, it's probably the most technical musical I've ever been in".

One of the benefits of working on the musical has been the presence of Director Stephen Daldry, Author and Lyricist Lee Hall, and Choreographer Peter Darling, all of whom reassembled for the musical after creating the film over a decade ago now.  While you might expect them to have all pre-ordained ideas of how the show should be done, Emily says she has had a lot of freedom in making choices through the rehearsal process.  "The creative team keeps reminding me that I'm the youngest person to ever play the role.  I'm not sure what that means, but there have been three other productions in London, New York and Australia, and this is the fourth incarnation.  What's been great is these are the same people who did the film who did the musical, but they have managed to not stick the movie on stage.  They managed to take the idea of the movie and create a new entity.  It's kind of amazing that they could look at it freshly and do that.  There are sequences in the show that are just brilliant, some genius moments.

"With my particular role they were really incredibly open to allowing me to find my own way within it.  I have an idea in my head that she really was a performer, that she actually had a career for a bit of time, which makes it fun to play with the musical numbers."  One of the challenges of the show is getting the Northern England accents down.  "All of us have had significant dialect coaching because it's such a specific sound from New Castle going up towards Scotland, and it's not the easiest sound to master.  But it's been a good challenge and now we do it and it feel like home."

There is an old mantra in theatre to never work with children and animals, but Emily has seen and known the benefits of a life in the theatre.  "When I was a little kid in kindergarten, I was really hyper, so much so they were going to hold me back and not pass me into the first grade.  They tried everything to figure out how to get me to chill out.  One day my kindergarten teacher said to me, 'OK, Emily, you get to have 10 minutes every day to entertain the class.  When that time is over you have to sit down and be with the class.'  And it worked like a charm.  I got to channel it all.  And the kindergarten teacher called my mother and said, 'I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have an actress, so I'm just warning you.'"

Emily is not the only talented Skinner offspring, either.  Her sister is a talented performer and writer who currently works in the New York sketch comedy and Improv scene.  Emily has a number of CD's out including various cast albums, duets with Alice Ripley, compilations and her solo album titled, what else, "Emily Skinner".  Her advice to aspiring young thespians and their parents?  "I think the best training for being on stage is being on the stage.  If you want to be a performer, go perform, find some place to do it.  Get into a class, your community theatre, audition for professional things if you see them come up." 

In spite of all the child actor horror stories one often hears of, Emily Skinner is living proof that the theatre can be, as another lyric goes, "A fine life".  You can catch her living the life on stage in the exclusive Broadway in Chicago sit-down run of "Billy Elliot" at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre.  Her contract is for one year and it's an open run, but don't wait to get your tickets.  "You want to see one of the fantastic Billy's who are doing it right now.  The Billy's we have right now are extraordinary, and who knows how long they will be able to do the role because these boys grow up so fast.  Their voices do change, so they definitely have a limited span of how long they can do the role."  "Billy Elliot" promises to be the must-see event of the Chicago theatre season this year, and as Emily says, "Come see the show.  It will blow your mind."