Chicago Sun-Times

Porchlight’s bravura ‘Billy Elliot’ taps a remarkable young talent

Hedy Weiss

"...Not only must the lad playing Billy be able to act, dance and sing with formidable skill, but he must make you fall in love with his true grit, his remarkable awakening, and the mixture of elation and sadness that drives every moment of his young life...In Lincoln Seymour, the lean, sad-eyed, beautifully expressive 14-year-old who stars in Porchlight Music Theatre’s fervent, heartrending, tears-and-laughter-inducing new production of the show, director Brenda Didier has found a rare and altogether remarkable talent. Seymour is so natural, and at the same time so gifted, that when one of the adults in the musical explains that dance can be a calculated technical art, or something that emerges from the person like breath itself, it sounds as if the line were added just to pay tribute to him."