Review: DISNEY'S NEWSIES at Starlight Theater

Disney’s Newsies does not merely seize the day. It dances on it, vaults over it and occasionally executes a backflip before the day knows what struck it. It takes an 1899 historical event as a jumping off place and imagines the history as it might have been retold in a 1930’s Busby Berkeley movie musical substituting teenage newsboys for the dancing girls.  The show is undeniably entertaining and well performed. 

Starlight Theatre continues its 2026 Broadway season with a newly produced staging of the popular musical. The production combines nationally experienced performers, Kansas City professionals, and thirty-three area high-school students drawn from Starlight’s Blue Star Awards program.  It appears to be a cast of thousands.

The unusually large company looks right at home on Starlight’s immense outdoor stage. The set fits comfortably the sixty-five foot Starlight proscenium opening.

The story centers on Jack Kelly (Lucas Pastrana), the unofficial leader of desperately poor boys who survive by selling copies of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World.

Jack dreams of escaping the city for the open spaces of Santa Fe, although his romantic picture of the West may owe more to imagination than experience.

Pastrana more than fills the role.  He has an excellent musical theater voice, well-schooled, and with an emphasis on not over singing his role.

Jack is a prototype Disney heroic character who never really existed in life. He is the most outstanding of the Newsies. He is imbued by book writer Harvey Fierstein with a heroic persona, an unschooled talent as an artist, a perfect receptacle for the female lead to fall in love with and by composer Alan Menken with the free standing, ear worm anthem of a lead song entitled “Santa Fe.”  

Evil Joseph Pulitzer (Graham Rowat) raises the wholesale price of newspapers to the contractor newsboys because he can. The price rise is portrayed as for no good reason other than profit in Pulitzer’s pocket.Pulitzer was a considerably more complicated figure than the coldhearted capitalist the musical requires.

It is important to note that Joseph Pulitzer was not present for the Newsies strike.   He was quite a cloistered individual and blind by 1899. He lived the last years of his life in his yacht.  At this time, he was seems to have been physically located in Maine. 

Pulitzer (in our play) assumes that hungry children will be easily intimidated. That turns out to be a serious miscalculation.Rowat is a powerful double bass.  I’ve seen Newsies several times and each time have been vocally impressed by the actor who plays Pultzer.

Jack and the Newsies are mainly homeless boys with no prospects. Jack and his sidekicks Crutchie (Ryan Jacobs) and Davey (Sam Yousuf) group together and organize a strike.  David’s little brother Les (Carson Cornwall or Lucas Gutierrez-Sullenger) is kind of a stock character inserted as someone the hero can protect.

Harvey Fierstein’s book, adapted from Disney’s 1992 film of the same name, greatly improves the material for the stage. It gives the newsboys’ rebellion a clearer dramatic line and supplies Jack with a more effective romantic partner in Katherine Plummer (Aubrey Matalon), an ambitious young reporter fighting her own battle to be taken seriously even as she is the supposed daughter of Joseph Pulitzer.

Katherine is another character imagined out of whole cloth by Fierstein.  Katherine owes great debt to a real-life girl reporter named Nelly Bly who surfaced about twelve years earlier.Joseph Pultizer did have a daughter named Katherine, but she died aged two in 1884.

Miss Matalon is excellent as Katherine.  She is the prototypical Disney heroine.  Menkin gives Katherine a couple nice songs “Watch What Happens” and “Something to Believe In”  (with Jack).

The Refuge was a real place (kind of a reform school) that stands in for Nelly Bly’s landmark story series on the New York mental health system about twelve years earlier.

The musical nevertheless remains better at movement than reflection. Its treatment of labor history is simplified, its villains are conveniently villainous, and its resolution carries the unmistakable glow of the Disney factory.

No one should mistake Newsies for a documentary. Its history has been rearranged to serve a rousing Broadway fable about young people discovering that those without money or influence can acquire power by standing together.

Alan Menken’s music and Jack Feldman’s lyrics accomplish most of the heavy lifting. “Carrying the Banner” establishes the newsies’ exhausting daily world, while “The World Will Know” transforms scattered resentment into organized resistance.

“Seize the Day” remains the show’s great theatrical engine: part anthem, part dance marathon and part declaration that the boys will no longer accept the conditions handed to them.

“Santa Fe” gives Jack the conventional musical-theater dream song, although the character becomes more interesting when he stops dreaming about escape and accepts responsibility for those he would leave behind.

Katherine receives the evening’s cleverest comic number, “Watch What Happens.” Attempting to write the story that might establish her career, she alternates between professional confidence, romantic distraction and the terror known to every reporter confronting an empty page and an approaching deadline.

Matalon, who has appeared on Broadway in Six, has the opportunity to make Katherine something more than Jack’s obligatory love interest. She does well.

Pastrana must supply Jack with swagger, a convincing period accent, a strong upper register and enough vulnerability to keep the character from becoming a collection of heroic poses. Pastrana may be someone who might be referred to on the future on the Great White Way. He is surrounded by Sam Yousuf as the practical Davey and Kansas City native Ryan Jacobs as Crutchie, whose imprisonment gives the strike a personal cost.

Kansas City native Bryonha Marie returns home as theatrical impresario Medda Larkin. Her Broadway credits include Ragtime, After Midnight, The Book of Mormon and Prince of Broadway. Graham Rowat, another Broadway veteran, plays Pulitzer. Young local performers Carson Cornwell and Lucas Gutierrez-Sullenger alternate as Les.

Director-choreographer David Grindrod faces the production’s central challenge. The dancing must be athletic without becoming merely gymnastic. The leaps, turns and tumbling earn their place when they express the newsies’ bravado, camaraderie and barely controlled anger.  The director’s prior experience with “A Chorus Line” shows in the choreography for “Newsies.

The addition of Starlight’s 33-member teen ensemble gives the strike genuine scale and provides those young performers with unusually valuable professional experience. This is a Starlight-produced staging, licensed by Music Theatre International, rather than the national tour.

Newsies is sometimes sentimental, frequently improbable and almost shameless in its determination to send an audience home cheering. It is also an expertly constructed piece of popular theater with a message that has not become less relevant: people easily ignored as individuals can become formidable when they act together.

Disney’s Newsies continues through Sept. 13 at Starlight Theatre, 4600 Starlight Road, Kansas City, Missouri. Performances begin at 7:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased at wwwkcstarlight.com.

Photos by Josh Chaikin

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