BWW Reviews: NEWSIES Dances Away with the Benedum Center

By the mid-2000s, Disney's patented formula for Broadway success (take one of their top film properties, hand them to respected Broadway or avant-garde theatre talent, expand the scores, make huge amounts of money) had worn itself thin. There weren't many bona fide classics left to adapt for them. After failing to squeeze much blood from The Little Mermaid and Tarzan in a similar fashion (although both shows were rewritten and vastly improved on the road), Disney took a more interesting path, taking on second-tier properties and reinventing them, rather than just restaging them. Their smart, Sondheimesque rewrite of Mary Poppins ran for years on Broadway, and their recent forays into family-friendly but adult-targeting pieces like Peter and the Starcatcher and The Hunchback of Notre Dame have garnered massive critical praise. Newsies, however, was a shot in the dark.

No one is ever going to call Newsies a cinematic masterpiece, even falling where it did in the period now known as the Disney Renaissance of movie musicals. Its reputation rests solely on years of reruns on the Disney Channel, bolstered by two or three great Alan Menken tunes with lyrics by Jack Feldman, and the notoriety of Christian Bale in his only singing and dancing role. (Then there's the fact that it's full of scantily clad young men singing, dancing and showering together, a fact that has endeared it to women and men alike as a guilty pleasure.) Other than that, there's not a lot of good that can be said about Newsies as a film.

So why is Newsies as a stage musical so damn good? Disney, with the help of librettist Harvey Fierstein, made the best of all possible choices, keeping the idea of the plot, most of the characters, and a handful of the songs, then throwing the rest in the trash and starting fresh. As always, the story follows drifter and newspaper-hawker extraordinaire Jack Kelly (played by Dan DeLuca), a street-smart young man who has become an unlikely father figure to the other poor, homeless and downtrodden young men who sell Joseph Pulitzer's "papes" on the street corner for next to nothing. When Pulitzer (Steve Blanchard) decides to raise his profit margin by milking the newsies for more money without raising the consumer price, Kelly quickly becomes a makeshift union leader, mobilizing his neighborhood's newsies into a strike he hopes will spread throughout New York and stop Pulitzer's media machine in its tracks.

All of this should be familiar to anyone with memories of the film, but where the show shines is in its deviations from the source material. Gone is Jack Kelly's angst over being an orphan, longing for a family in Santa Fe. His new ambition is to make good and eventually make it out of the city to Santa Fe- not to find a loving family home, but to protect his best friend, Crutchie (Zachary Sayle) from the police and truancy officers who have long attempted to send him to a ward for wayward boys. The power ballad "Santa Fe" has been redesigned, first into a duet for the two young men as they sing of leaving the city behind, then as an angry, desparate breakdown number in which Jack questions his faith in humanity and in the town he's dreamed of for so long. This is where DeLuca gets to shine- Jack Kelly may appear to be a seriocomic role with a cartoonish accent and plenty of character-appropriate mugging, but when he gets serious and lets his golden upper range ring out, even the silly dialect work (it wouldn't be Newsies if the accents weren't a little too broad to be believed) becomes heartbreaking.

Jack's love interest from the film, as well as his reporter mentor, have been rolled into a composite character, and a much better one, at that. Katherine (an immensely charming Stephanie Styles) is an upper-class young woman trying desperately to be taken seriously as a reporter, battling the institutionalized sexism that forces her to write nothing but "women's interest" puff pieces. Although her relationship with Jack begins with the usual antagonism, their love story develops as she finds the gem of a story she has waited for in Kelly and his strike. Katherine is a genuinely interesting character, as her parallel struggle of being female rolls along in conjunction with the men's struggle with poverty and oppressive social institutions. Additionally, by giving her genuinely funny comic material, a patter song, and an unexpected dance break, as opposed to the midtempos and ballads usually given to the female lead in a show like this, Styles gets to surprise the audience again and again with unexpected virtues of her performance.

Granted, the piece still has its weak points that even a virtuoso like Harvey Fierstein seems to have struggled to iron out. Medda Larkin, the burlesque singer played by Ann-Margret in the film, has been rewritten as an all-too-familiar Broadway trope, the "big black lady" role who does little for the plot other than offer warmth, humor and a few risque double entendres. Angela Grovey performs well in her handful of scenes and one big song, but her material remains relatively extraneous. In a similar vein, Steve Blanchard, the biggest Broadway name in the cast, seems too vocally light for the deep, booming bass the music seems to call for, and Fierstein seems unable to decide how sympathetic or despicable to make this major historical figure. As such, Blanchard seems torn between the need to play the character with a certain level of understanding and sympathy, and to chrew scenery as a melodrama villain, depending on the demands of the scene. The show's secret weapon, however, is John E. Brady, who plays a variety of authority figures who support or oppose the strike. Brady, who played the same roles in the out-of-town tryout and Broadway run, is virtually unrecognizable as he moves between characters, disappearing into the varied wigs, accents and facial hair applications he is hidden under. Fierstein's book, thankfully, never delves so far into broad comedy as to make this repeated doubling schticky, but draws all three characters as individuals.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that this is a fantastic example of a spectacle show that never takes the easy way out. I've always been a sucker for a cool conceptual set design, and Tobin Ost's labyrinth of fire escapes and winding staircases, mechanized and covered with retractable screens, creates an ever-shifting backdrop of city squalor that allows for several exciting chase sequences. The newsies provide a different kind of spectacle as well with their endlessly athletic dance sequences. It's all too easy to make heavy dance shows, especially shows with mostly-male casts, look a little bit too rarified, proper or effeminate. In a show like Newsies, which runs on testosterone and male bonding, allowing the dancing or horseplay to become overtly or even latently homoerotic would have been fatal, rendering the piece more camp than even the film version (choreographed by High School Musical helmsman Kenny Ortega). Thankfully, Christopher Gattelli's choreography is virtuosic, but appropriately macho. The overall effect is less West Side Story or even Grease, and more a nineteenth-century precursor to the Step Up school of street dancing and stunting. Not since Billy Elliot has dancing seemed so much like a full contact men's sport- and when Styles finally joins in for her big dance moment, she proves she has moves as good as the boys, with a stunt or two of her own.

Though it may have its rough points, the show is held together masterfully by Jeff Calhoun's direction, making it a crowd-pleaser that left the audience roaring its approval from the quiet first moments all the way to the choreographed curtain call. As I left the theatre, the moment that kept replaying in my head was not of a major dance sequence, or even a soaring ballad. Instead, I was (as the adage goes) "humming the scenery." During the eleven o'clock number, all at once, the newsies stop dancing, and the set begins to slowly roll upstage, evoking the dramatic crane-assisted zooms seen so commonly in movies during the climactic scene. For such a simple effect, the response was magical. "This is better than the movie," I thought in that moment. "This is better than ANY movie."

"And I probably should have learned to dance."