THERE’S GOOD NEWSIES AND BAD NEWSIES
Winner of two 2012 Tonys for best score and choreography, the rampaging romp called Newsies is mediocre material wrapped up in a special delivery. It comes from the Disney dreamers of Disney Theatrical Productions who fleshed out The Lion King, Mary Poppins, et al. from their original film counterparts. This screen-to-stage adventure reimagines the 1992 film, but the only thing bringing in adolescent groupies (who screamed on opening night at the Pantages as if Elvis were playing with The Beatles) is the most attractive, athletic cast since Peter Pan met the Lost Boys.
Soaring with dance as the 1992 film did with its jump-cut leaps and flash-dance adrenal editing, the emphasis for the 2011 musical (now on a national tour through Oct. 2016) is even more on kids than adults (but the best scenes here involve grown-up characters). Overall, the script is enervating. So what’s the appeal besides the movement? Charged with compassion for these adolescent underdogs, you can sense the delirious young audience-goers mentally dancing with the newsboys and, not incidentally, growing some generational solidarity as they sympathize with their strike. And adults no doubt understand that protest is very much in the air right now. While the book now has an improvement with the addition of a new character, Katherine, a love interest for Jack, it’s still straightforward, predictable, and rather dull.
This hard-boiled, tough-loving creation by composer Alan Menken, bookwriter Harvey Fierstein, and lyricist Jack Feldman is roughly based on the actual “Newsboy Strike of 1899,” a two-week work stoppage against venal Joseph Pulitzer (Steve Blanchard), William Randolph Hearst, and other “malefactors of great wealth,” a phrase coined by Teddy Roosevelt (Kevin Carolan), a late-entrance hero. All the tykes want is what Teddy offered—a “square deal.”
A long-ago legend is here transformed into a dance marathon of gymnastic gyrations that’s alternately thrilling and exhausting—and leaves any plot in the New York dust. Indeed Newsies is so much about the title punks, it’s as if Oliver Twist fixated on the Artful Dodger and Fagin’s pickpockets, with the orphan’s salvation a mere subplot. Or if Les Miz made the urchin Gavroche, martyr of the barricades, the main character.
A mere excuse for Christopher Gattelli’s combustible choreography, the Horatio Alger-style story chronicles how pluck and luck inspire 17-year-old homeless Jack Kelly (Joey Barreiro), a teen who dreams of exchanging Gotham grit for his dreamtown of Santa Fe. This rebel of the rooftops will rouse the rabble—his ragged band of “little rascals” and “Bowery boys”—to inflict a strike on the predatory “papes” that are screwing them out of fair wages and incentive pay. Tired of only having the “right to starve,” these thwarted entrepreneurs (endearing Crutchie, nerdy Davey, and bumptious other boys) will literally “stop The World,” among other rags.
Jack, who must unite newsies from all the boroughs, gets help from music-hall chanteuse Medda (Aisha de Haas) and, improbably and unconvincingly, from Pulitzer’s daughter Katherine (Morgan Keene), a heroine who’s really one more beneficiary of plutocratic nepotism. As I said, the love story was added here; in the film, Bill Pullman played a male reporter for The Sun who publicizes the deliverers’ 
plight, gets them their own press to spread the strike, then ultimately disappoints them, just as grownups do for hard-hoping street kids (Christian Bale, the original Jack, would just have to grow up to become Batman).
Anyway, this youth-drenched tale (“Old people talk too much,” one kid hypocritically opines) gives center stage to the incredible hoofing of these inexhaustible pyro tyros. Their pile-driving, perpetual-motion breakouts erupt in such incandescent rousers as “Carrying the Banner” and “Seize the Day.” If youth were a drug, the whole stage would be a crack house. And, if justice required somersaults, back flips, breathtaking arabesques and Olympic leaps, the newsies’ strike, histrionically called a “Children’s Crusade,” would have ended in two days, not two weeks. But, ultimately, it’s words, not steps, which count in a cause. Alas, Fierstein’s anything-for-a-laugh book is off-balance and under-developed.
The producers must have been aware of this as they surround the substandard script with Gattelli’s non-stop dance numbers that unfortunately bring to mind an all-male production of Bring It On, more modern-day male cheerleaders than turn-of-the-century newsboys. The performers’ subtext screams, “Look at me, Ma, I’m doing gymnastics on a Broadway National Tour!” The intensity gratefully stops at the opening of Act II for “King of New York,” an old fashioned, show-stopping tap number. For once the Annie-cum-Les Miz shenanigans are replaced by the sheer pleasure of performing.
Director Jeff Calhoun keeps the show moving at breakneck speed, as if he were afraid the audience was suffering from chronic ADD. It’s a Disney production, so the tech is uniformly state-of-the-art: the terpsichorean tripe and angsty agitation as exultation is played against set designer Tobin Ost’s rapidly revolving but shaky iron scaffolding, an endlessly rotating set of fire escapes that perfectly frame Sven Ortel’s period projections and the flying props that depict Newsie Square, a “refuge” prison, Pulitzer’s office and cellar, the Brooklyn Bridge, and Medda’s unnamed theater. Danny Troob’s orchestrations are flawless, but music director James Dodgson forgot to tell his young players that the new vocalizing style of American Idol-esque whining eats up lyrics for lunch.
For some, Newsies’ showbiz savvy and sheer feel-good kinetic energy can more than pass for eloquence. But the producers’ desperation to please and the rabid, undiscerning fans’ desperation to be pleased brings down this wise guy DancerPalooza. Nothing can hide that the show as a whole lacks a soul.
photos by Deen Van Meer
Newsies
National Tour
ends on September 4, 2016 at the Pantages Theatre
for tickets, call 800.982.2787 or visit Hollywood Pantages
$20 orchestra seats possible at Daily Digital Lottery
tour continues through October, 2016
for cities and dates, visit Newsies The Musical
screening of the tour starring Jeremy Jordan begins February 16, 2017
for dates and cities, visit Fathom Events