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The Peter Pans of Broadway

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Kiril rehearsing; David rehearsing.

(Photo: Rachel Papo)

“Even if he grows tomorrow,” David Sr. continues, “it will have been worth it because of what he’s learned from being pushed to his limits. But he doesn’t yet know that talent is not enough in life. There is also”—he pauses for a moment—“will.”

Yanek sighs and speaks in English for nearly the first time. “This I don’t have,” she says.

* * *

Do you worry about your voice breaking?

Trent: Yes. Right now I sound like shit.

Kiril: I don’t think about it. I’m sure my voice will break, but the more you start thinking about it, the more you might make it happen.

David: Half and half. If I can last a year I’ll be happy.

And what about your height?

Kiril: Until now I was always, “Grow, grow, grow,” because I want to partner and you can’t until you’re bigger than the girls and have strong arms and shoulders. Now I’m like, “Stop growing, stop growing, stop growing!”

David: My mom used to measure me up against the wall and put the pencil at an angle to make me look taller. Now she squishes my head down to make me smaller.

Trent: Yeah, we’re lucky that Haydn’s like seven feet tall.

Do you know what you want to be when you grow too old to play Billy?

Kiril: A professional ballet dancer and/or choreographer.

David: Me too. A dancer at ABT and then a choreographer when I retire in 30 years.

Trent: All my life I’ve been a dancer. I still love it, but now that I’m doing this I want to do more.

* * *

More? Having just turned 50, Lauretta Kowalik doesn’t seem very eager for that. The night of Trent’s debut she had a tired, tight expression in her eyes, the kind you might expect to see on an air-traffic controller after a double shift with two near collisions. The scheduling and ferrying and waiting behind one kind of barricade or another is a job that she and her husband, Michael, have performed for years. This on top of their paying jobs—he as a surveyor, she an organist—as well as the ordinary responsibility of raising Trent and his three older sisters: Carine and Siobhan in college, Daria in high school.

And the job had not gotten easier. If Billy Elliot was the culmination of all their effort, it was also an extreme example of it. Because of the complicated casting permutations, the Kowaliks were kept on their toes almost as much as Trent himself. Who would play the opening, or record the album (if there is one), or be reviewed by which critics on which press night was anyone’s guess. And while the boys didn’t have to deal with this sort of thing—the production kept them safely in a bubble of hard work—their parents did. Trent’s debut, for instance, had been rescheduled twice, most recently at three that afternoon; David was home sick and Kiril wasn’t feeling much better. After once again exchanging 30 tickets for family and friends, Lauretta scrambled to find a sub to cover the Yom Kippur Eve service at the Community Reform Temple of Westbury, which was, in terms of her own creative expression, always the best gig of the year.

More difficult was the problem of Daria, who was at cross-country practice—but whose cell phone wasn’t—when the news came in. Michael drove all over Wantagh, searching every field where the team sometimes ran. When he finally found her, at 5:20, she said she was too much of a sweaty mess to join them on the 5:59 train and was unwilling to go by herself on a later one. In the standoff, no one volunteered to wait for her, nor did she soften her position. It would fall to Lauretta to console her later, or possibly face her “spitting sparks,” not only about missing her brother’s big debut but also about the way his needs had for years taken priority in the family. After all, Daria had been a high-ranking Irish dancer, too, if not a world champion like Trent. It was in her huge tap shoes, while watching a video of Riverdance, that he had first tried to stamp the steps like Michael Flatley, on cutting boards snatched from the kitchen.

“If anyone tells you this is easy,” Lauretta says, “they should talk to her.”

But then there was the thrilling sight of her son bowing at the end of the show in front of a giant electrified sign that said billy. Was he indeed Billy? The boy whose dreams of dancing wrested him from his family? When Trent was asked to go to London, some friends questioned the Kowaliks’ decision, even though he would be living in a “Billy House” with castmates and a kindly chaperone couple. “They said, mostly behind our backs, ‘How could you let him go like that?’ ” Lauretta recalls. “But the question really was ‘How could we not?’

“It’s like when he was offered a newsboy role in Gypsy on the same day as his Billy callback. He had to choose right away between the definite and the possible. People said, ‘Don’t let him not take the part in Gypsy,’ but I said he has to choose for himself. I mean, if I pushed him to take it I’d be just like Mama Rose, right? So I told him it was up to him. He said, ‘I think I’d make them a good Billy Elliot.’ He has an uncanny perception of exactly where he stands.”

All three boys do; perhaps it comes from dancing. Or perhaps from their extraordinary relationships with their mothers. The talent is their own creation, but you don’t have to look too far to see how they learned that it comes with a sell-by date. Each his mother’s youngest son, they seem to know, in a way their peers rarely fathom, that time is always running out. Maybe the New York production will soon have reason to offer its own aftercare program, but until then what little is left of their childhood must be squeezed completely—not wantonly spilled. Either way, it will not come back.

So far their bodies have cooperated. And so has the production. Because Kiril’s voice is beginning to show signs of deepening, a new arrangement of the song “Electricity” has been prepared for him in a lower key. The orchestra parts are copied and ready to go at a moment’s notice. But Kiril has asked not to sing it that way—not yet. And if his voice cracks on a high note occasionally, who can say it’s not just emotion?