The New York Times is so relentless in its praise of Billy Elliot on Broadway that I feel like I should toss a little more fuel on my fire.

The play is about the sheer beauty of dance, but the producers don't actually believe that's enough to entertain us. In one pivotal scene, Billy dances with his adult self. It's more kitschy than beautiful, with Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake blasting our eardrums tinnily, and it takes a couple inexplicable turns. First, acting in tandem, the characters bring out chairs and set them spinning. They hold one corner of the chair's back and spin it like a top on one leg. Call me crazy, but I don't recall this move from Swan Lake. You half think after the next tour jeté they're going to start spinning plates on sticks. This kid could be the next Nureyev if he could juggle flaming clubs.

Then, halfway through this dance Billy starts flying -- you know, soaring across the stage attached to a cable -- to express the sheer joy he feels.

Wait, we think. Dance isn't good enough to express joy?

Mostly, though, when confronted with this adult male dancer, we start to wonder if Billy's made the right choice. The man's definitely been in this for a while. He knows what he's doing. But frankly, he looks a little weird. He's prissy. He's darting from one side of the stage to the other, posing like a Chelsea gym bunny. We expect him to do a set of dumbbell curls before getting a protein shake at the juice bar. He's in a skin-tight leotard, with a dance belt so huge it looks like he's smuggling bratwurst onto the stage.

He leads Billy around the stage like -- okay, I'll say it -- a gay Pied Piper, doing jumps and leaps and waving his arms like Liza Minnelli, and rather than be thrilled to see what Billy will turn into with the proper training we start to wonder if he's made the right choice. Um, aren't there any accounting classes in Wales?

The kid does nothing but dance, and at some point you wonder if that's good. You picture him in any other class in school:

TEACHER: Billy, what's three plus four?

BILLY: Beats me. Wanna see me tap-dance down stairs?

His dancing is so incessant it seems to have overwhelmed normal human emotion:

POOR MINER: Billy, we miners have no hope for the future. If we don't get killed in cave-ins, they're going to close and we're all going to starve. Sure, we thought you were a poofter a few minutes ago, but now we realize you're blessed by Sweet Jesus to have such an amazing skill, because it's that skill that's going to buy your way out of this hellhole. Please, take this fifty cents that I've saved up over the last thirty years, and when you go to London to join the Dance Academy, buy a croissant and think of me.

BILLY: Okay. Watch me pirouette!

In the end, we're not quite as happy as the producers want us to be. Billy's leaving his family and friends to pursue his bright new future, soon to turn into a prissy dude in skintight tanktop and kielbasa shorts. All the miners have been transformed from proud, strong men to politically-correct metrosexuals who're probably heading to Connecticut Muffins when the curtain falls. Look! they shout, twirling around the stage in XL tutus. We're not cretins! We're supportive, fun-loving miners secure in our masculinity who finally see the beauty in dance!

I leave the theatre thinking about the show I really want to see. Somewhere in West Hollywood an odd little boy is born to a fashion writer and a theater critic. The couple want the kid to follow the family profession, but he startles them with his skill at unclogging stuck drains. Eventually the community rallies around him -- "Damn it, kid, I wish I could do something people needed instead of just writing about winter caftans for Men's Vogue" -- and the kid moves to Rialto to open up a Roto-Rooter franchise.

Because, hell, I'm all for the arts, but it's about time somebody stood up and said, hey, you know all those professions that regular people do? They're nothing to freakin' sneeze at.

Give me that, Broadway, and I'll spring for opening-night muffins myself.