“Newsies,” the touring Disney hit musical now at the National Theatre through June 21, is something of a throwback—all the way to the days when Teddy Roosevelt was not president of the United States but governor of New York.
It’s also a rare bird—a musical that combines contemporary set-making (industrial-strength moving parts) with something so rare that it seems fresh. That would be dancing: dynamic, youthful, energetic and athletic dancing that sparks the proceedings almost for its own sake.
Oddly enough, for a big Broadway show, it’s practically accurate, in the sense that there really was a strike of Newsies, the young boys of New York City, who sold the peps, the screaming headline newspapers of the Pulitzers, the Hearsts, the Post, the Times, and others, and paid for the privilege at cutthroat rates.
When the coldly calculating Pulitzer, who could win a Pulitzer for meanest tycoon, raises the price for the newsies, most of them orphans living under deplorable conditions in an era when child labor was still rampant, they do the unthinkable. They go on strike. They’re led by the charismatic but troubled Jack Kelly, who’s helped by the plucky and brave (not to mention cute as a button) reporter Katherine, who gets them a front-page story and picture.
Will the newsies—most of them singing and talking in all the dialects of Brooklyn and the Bronx—triumph against all odds? Can a pumpkin become a coach? This is a Disney effort, after all.
For anybody with a long history or a major in movie shorts, these boys—tough, but sweet and full of dreams that kids in the ghettos of the time carried around like other kids carried toys—are right out of the old Bower Boys series: the only thing missing is a dog.
But Huntz Hall and Leo Gorcey (the old Bowery Boys stars) couldn’t hold a candle to these kids. These boys can dance, they can stomp, the can do somersaults, giant splits and leaps, and they handle anything from a broom to chairs as dancing partners. The big numbers—“King of New York,” “The World Will Know,” “Carrying the Banner,” and “Seize the Day”—are really big dance numbers and they sweep up the audience in their wake. It’s the engine and energy that drives the show and its melodramatic, penny dreadful plot, in which the hero, Jack, yearns for a saner, quieter place like “Santa Fe,” where he hopes to live with his pal Crutchie. (You guessed it, there’s a kid with crutches.)
“Newsies” started out as a 1992 movie which starred Christian Bale (soon to become “Batman”), but flopped mightily. Undeterred, Disney turned it into a wham-bang Broadway musical, which became a major league hit, with a big, youthful following made up with many adolescent girls enamored of the young hero. You could tell by the whistling and squealing.
The book is traditional Disney fare, including a lot of boy-meet-girl, a hero who wants to be an artist, a wise-butt little kid, nasty strike breakers, the imperious Pulitzer in his nest, and so on. It has its echoes—the newsies include among their demands fair wages and safe conditions for children working until they drop in the slums. For some of us who were born and raised in the pre-computer days of ink-stained presses, the show carries a little bit of nostalgia—we remember, if not the actual voices, at least movies in which newsboys yelled “Extra, Extra!” and newspapers were a booming business from which we received, for a dime or a penny or a nickel and a quarter (today’s Post is $1.50), a days worth of entertainment, gaudy, big headline news, births and deaths, the Katzenjammer Kids and the Lone Ranger, Miss Lonelyhearts, and sensational news of movie stars and distant places. Or something like that.
“Newsies,” for all that, is a money’s worth entertainment that delivers a high-flying show,fair-to-middling music (Broadway has yet to figure out just what the music in Broadway musicals is supposed to sound like), a Disney story and world-class dancing.
