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Actually, I found it more overwhelming than stirring, said Ben Brantley in The New York Times. This show is “nothing but headlines, all set in extra-large type, all goal-posted with exclamation points.’’ The relentlessly energetic singing and dancing may suit the show’s plot, in which poor, exploited newsboys band together and strike against their greedy bosses. But the result is that the performers appear to be “burning energy like toddlers on a sugar high”—executing split leaps, back flips, kick lines, somersaults, and “enough pirouettes to fill a whole season of Swan Lake.” The barrage left me gasping for relief “from all that extra! extra! enthusiasm.”
Though “aficionados looking for art or subtlety in their musical theater might sniff,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter, it’s hard to resist the show’s verve. True, some of the boys “look a bit beyond urchin age,” particularly Jeremy Jordan as the 17-year-old ringleader. But Jordan is “a natural musical theater star who brings effortless charisma to the role,” and he’s well matched with Kara Lindsay, who, as sympathetic reporter Katherine, is a heroine “firmly in the mold” of Disney’s “feisty” princesses. Unlike most of her screen counterparts, though, Katherine isn’t royalty. The surprise of the show is that it’s not a big-budget Disney fairy tale. Instead, Newsies portrays real underdogs, and it wins over the audience by keeping things “simple, spirited, and engagingly old-fashioned.”
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Israel: Losing the American publicFeature A recent poll finds American support for Israel's military action in Gaza has fallen from 50% to 32%
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Unmaking AmericansFeature Trump is threatening to revoke the citizenship of foreign-born Americans. Could he do that?
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EPA: A bonfire of climate change regulationsFeature The Environmental Protection Agency wants to roll back its 'endangerment finding,' a ruling that lets the agency regulate carbon emissions
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If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
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Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
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Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
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The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
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Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
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The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
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No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
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The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.