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Leaping onto Broadway

Trent Kowalik of Wantagh bounds into New York, where he puts his best feet forward as the star of 'Billy Elliot'

BY ROBERT KAHN | robert.kahn@newsday.com

November 9, 2008

About six months ago, Trent Kowalik came within seconds of a perfect 300 in Wii bowling, until nerves scuttled his chances in the 10th frame. On Sunday afternoons, he likes to go out on his cousin's boat, motoring into the Great South Bay. And like any teenage boy, he gets a little impish when talk turns to his sisters.

"The less you see them, the more you appreciate them," he says. It never registers with him that this might be construed as funny.

At 13, Trent could pass for any freckle-faced, basketball-obsessed teenager from

Wantagh. But suppositions about "average" tumble out the window once you witness his acrobatics. The kid bounds around the stage like a Cirque du Soleil gymnast whose DNA has somehow been spun with an ABT soloist.

Evenings this autumn, as his peers are getting their homework checked over, Trent will embark on 2 1/2 hours of tapping across (and levitating above) the Imperial Theatre stage, where he's one of three boys alternating the lead of "Billy Elliot," the Broadway musical based on the spirited 2000 movie. It opens Thursday.

Of the three "Billys," only Trent has played the role before, in London's West End, where he spent the first half of 2008 perfecting his "Geordie" dialect, a reference to the people of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England, where most of the action transpires. The triple-casting is required, producers say, because of the sheer stamina the role requires (not to say a thing about child-labor practices).

"Billy Elliot: The Musical," like its cinematic counterpart, is set in 1984, as the British National Union of Mineworkers has gone on strike to protest threatened closures by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (who appears in "Billy" as a giant villainess puppet). The strike lasted a year, until the union was broken.

Within this dark setting comes the fictional story of an 11-year-old boy coping with his mother's recent death. Billy stumbles into a ballet class while on his way to a boxing lesson and realizes that his future may lay on a different path. But the pursuit invites scorn from his blue-collar family and insinuations from classmates that he's a "poof."

"Billy just wanted to dance. He didn't care that other boys didn't do it," Trent says during a recent rehearsal break, noting one of the few similarities he sees between Billy's circumstances and his own. He is sitting in the upper mezzanine of the Imperial, talking between forkfuls of rigatoni from a plastic bowl.

"When I was young, I didn't realize that other boys didn't dance," Trent continues. "When I got older, I realized it - but that didn't stop me from doing it. A lot of parents might not want their sons being dancers. My parents were all for it."

Michael and Lauretta Kowalik had already shepherded their three older girls through Irish dancing classes, and Trent had shown an interest in the form early on. A family story circulates about him "borrowing" sister Daria's tap shoes, finding cutting boards in the kitchen and mimicking her moves in front of a VHS tape of "Riverdance."

At 3, though, the boy would have to wait another year until he was allowed to enroll in the hell-unleashed, foot-stomping lessons he was eager to try.

It was around this time that Michael Kowalik saw an ad in the Wantagh-Seaford Citizen with an offer of free training for boys at a Bellmore dance school. There were no age restrictions at Dorothy's School of Dance, so Michael, a surveyor, and Lauretta, a church organist, took their son to meet the owner.

In Trent's life, Dorothy Medico is something of a parallel to Mrs. Wilkinson, the colorful dance instructor who first points Billy toward a barre. While Mrs. Wilkinson chain-smokes in front of her tutu-clad charges, Medico, who has operated Dorothy's for 31 years, gets an occasional nicotine fix "in hiding" outside her Merrick Road studios.

"The children," she notes, "are impressionable."

Medico's first impressions of young Trent were that he was "a real spitfire." At Dorothy's, Trent started off in ballet and tap, and then, as he got older (say, 5) moved on to jazz, hip-hop and acrobatic tumbling. At almost the same time, he began "doing Irish" - a vernacular employed by those in-the-know - at the Inishfree School of Irish Dance, which held classes in Massapequa, Port Jefferson and elsewhere.

Stepping into dance styles

Tap and Irish are both hard-shoe dances, but tap requires a loose upper body. In step-dancing, the upper body is held stiff as a board. Throughout his childhood, Trent simultaneously studied both forms, a junior Fred Astaire one day, a miniature Michael Flatley the next.

"Thank God, he was able to find the difference between the two," Medico says.

In April 2006, Trent, then 11, became the youngest American to win the World Irish Dancing Championship, in Belfast. It was just about six months earlier that the Kowaliks had first heard from an Irish dancing teacher that a search was on to cast actors for a proposed American version of "Billy Elliot."