Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
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music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Jack Feldman, book by Harvey Fierstein, directed by Jeff Calhoun
David Mirvish, Ed Mirvish Theatre, Toronto
July 9-August 30, 2015
Katherine: “When will you stop singing that old song?”
Newsies is a so-so musical presented in a superior production by Disney Theatrical Productions. The main attraction is not the book, music or lyrics as much as its high energy, high flying dancing. In 2012 it understandably lost the Tony Award for Best Musical to Once, which has a much more involving story, greater emotional impact and more innovative staging. Though the show is based on an historical incident, it soon shifts into historical fantasy so that there is nothing useful to learn from the subject matter except a reiteration that David can beat Goliath. It’s hard to overcome the impression that the show is a cross between Oliver! and Les Misérables without the allure or excitement of either.
Newsies the musical is based on Newsies the movie from 1992, one of the biggest flops Disney has ever had for a live-action film. Both, the musical and film in turn are inspired by an actual event, the Newsboys’ Strike of 1899, when the newspaper hawkers of New York, known as “newsies”, held a strike after Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal, sought to increase profits by reducing compensation for the newsies.
Like the movie, the musical focus on the charismatic leader of the newsies, Jack Kelly (Dan DeLuca). Kelly takes care of his best friend, the Tiny Tim-like Crutchie (Zachary Sayle), so called because of an injured leg. Though Kelly dreams of leaving New York for the fresh air, sunshine and open spaces of New Mexico, he is clearly right at home in his job in New York where he is the focus of the World’s brigade of newsies. Kelly also has a talent for art and paints backdrops for a theatre he uses as a refuge presided over the singer Medda Larkin (Angela Grovey).
When we first see Kelly and Crutchie picking up their bundles of newspapers to sell, two new kids join the group. One is Davey (Jacob Kemp) and his eight-year-old brother Les (Vincent Crocilla). Unlike the other newsies they live at home with their parents. They’re working to support the family because their father has been injured. Eventually, Davey becomes the brains behind the strike while Kelly is its principal orator.
Meanwhile, in an implausible subplot, Kelly and Katherine (Stephanie Styles), a young female reporter for the New York Sun move in typical rom-com fashion from bickering to love. The dilemma over the strike, with neither side giving in, is finally solved by the appearance of a gubernator ex machina in the form of Teddy Roosevelt, then Governor of New York, who takes Pulitzer to task over his shameful treatment of the newsies.
History may have inspired the movie, but the movie significantly alters the facts. The leader of the Newsboys’ Strike of 1899 was led by a teenager named Louis Ballatt, who was nicknamed “Kid Blink” because he was blind in one eye. The film writers decided they needed an handsome hero and so pass Ballatt’s handicap on to his friend Crutchie in the form of a bad leg. Pulitzer, himself, was not a vital man in 1899. He had already been completely blind for ten years and ran the business by telephone with a managing editor. There was no intercession from Roosevelt and the strike ended without the resounding victory for the newsies that the film and movie depict.
For the musical book writer Harvey Fierstein takes the story even farther from history. As with his book for Kinky Boots, also playing now in Toronto, Harvey Fierstein takes an unconventional story and then does all he can to make it as conventional as possible. The movie has no love interest for Kelly. The Sun reporter is played by an older man. So Fierstein resurrects Pulitzer’s daughter Katherine, who died in 1884, to take on, quite implausibly, the reporter’s role and thus become a typical Disney princess in search of her Prince Charming.
The score is by Alan Menken, who also wrote the music for such Disney hits as Beauty and the Beast (1993), The Little Mermaid (2008) and Aladdin (2011). The music has hits and misses. Kelly’s soaring song yearning for a better place “Santa Fe” sounds like too many other soaring songs about yearning for a better place. Katherine’s song about trying to write a news article is too patently imitation Sondheim. The two most memorable songs are the newsies’ Act 1 rallying call “Seize the Day”, unfortunately reprised to death in Act 2, and the Act 2 lead-off “King of New York”.
Both songs become the music for the show’s main virtue – its high-voltage dancing. Choreographer Christopher Gattelli creates a potent mix of modern dance, jazz, classical ballet and acrobatics to depict the newsies’ vitality and comradeship. Act 1 ends in what is essentially a 10-minute-long ballet. Gattelli is rather too fond of the barrel roll turn and Act 2 seems to repeat everything we’ve already seen in Act except for one scene. That scene is the Act 2 opener when the troupe replace their dance boots for tap boots for an energetic, roof-raising tap number to “King of New York”.
Stephanie Styles delivers her dialogue with relentless perkiness. Her singing voice has a piercing quality that could well induce a sinus headache. On the plus side, Jacob Kemp has a his strong baritone and, in depicting Davey’s transition from meek outsider to impassioned activist, makes Davey the most involving and authentic character in the show. Also impressive is the Crutchie Zachary Sayle, who has a fine singing voice and forthright manner of speaking that helps cut through the layers of sentimentality that adhere to his role. Among the adults, Angela Grovey as Medda Larkin is the clear standout. Her honky-tonk song “That’s Rich” not only shows off her wide vocal range but serves as the only number that helps tie the show to its period.
Tobin Ost’s design of three moveable three-storey towers along with Sven Ortel’s projections represent the façades and back alleys of the buildings of New York, often with headlines and news columns superimposed on them to give the impression of a world run by news barons.
Given that the show has no crude language, no sexual content and no frightening noises, Newsies is being marketed as a family show suitable for children aged 6 and up. Kids may certainly enjoy the dancing and may identify with the Disneyfied smart-alecky kid Les, but the plot itself is so imbued with economic issues – the story is after all about a strike – that it’s hard to believe youngsters will find it interesting much less compelling. As an adult, the problem is reversed because the issues have been so simplified that they again are neither interesting or compelling. There is no depiction, for instance, of the hardship that the newsies suffer while on strike even though they previously seemed merely to survive from day to day on their meagre profits. One leaves the show with enormous admiration for the troupe of singers and dancers but with the regret that their energy has to struggle so hard to enliven the surrounding dullness.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Cast of Newsies; cast of Newsies; Stephanie Styles as Katherine and Dan DeLuca as Jack Kelly. ©2015 Deen van Meer.
2015-07-10
Newsies