Newsies

Nederlander Theatre, New York

(866) 870-2717

“Newsies’ days as a subterranean sensation are over,” said Scott Brown in New York magazine. It may seem odd that Disney has chosen to adapt a 20-year-old movie that was one of its own commercial flops. But in the years since, this story of the newsboys’ strike of 1899 “spread samizdat-style from show choir to show choir via its infectiously tuneful numbers,” many used in auditions. Now, with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein that includes a few new songs and a new character, the musical does more than merely exploit its cult following. With “every lyric a banner headline and every song an anthem,” it’s a universally stirring show.

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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.”