By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
The musical “Newsies” ripped from 125-years-old headlines remains relevant. These young newspaper peddlers were an earlier generation of gig workers.
Based on the 1992 Disney movie, “Newsies”, the Waterville Playshop brings the junior version of the musical to the Maumee Indoor Theatre with shows tonight (June 23) and Saturday at 8 p.m. with a Sunday matinee at 2:30 p.m. (Take extra time getting there. Avoid Conant Street.)
Directed by Shauna Newbold, “Disney’s Newsies Jr.” packs a lot of energy into its hour-long running time.
The romantic subplot is clipped, some music is omitted, and the scenic design is simplified. Still, this does justice to Fierstein’s script and Alan Menken and Jack Feldman’s songs.
And it showcases the chorus even more. The three dozen or so Newsies, who range from high schoolers to recent kindergarten graduates, are a high voltage crew. Choreographer Nicole Spadafore has fashioned numbers that capture that energy without overly straining the abilities of her young hoofers. This comes through in the show’s big anthems “The World Will Know,” “Seize the Day,” “King of New York,” and “Once and For All.” These are the heart of the show. (The show uses recorded tracks.)
At the center of the plot is Jack Kelly (Sophie Ditzig), a newspaper vendor with artistic talent and dreams of living the grit of the city for sunny Santa Fe. His sidekick is a handicapped kid called Crutchie (Delilah Torio). They take under their wing Davey (Layne Spillis) and his little brother Les Natalie Villagomez), newbie newsies who have resorted to selling papers because a workplace accident has cost their father his job. Though they are working class, they have leg up on the others. One newsie gushes, they have a mother and a father!
The script does a good job of depicting the deprivations of the time.
And the bosses of the time, aptly known as Robber Barons, were among the problems they had to confront. For these newsies it is the owner of the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer (Niko Banar) who is willing to balance his books on the backs of the news carriers when circulation declines with the end of the Spanish American War. He raises the price he charges them for the papers they sell, and they cannot return for what they don’t sell.
The newsies led by Jack with advice from the bookish Davey, leads a strike.
Cub reporter Katherine (Annabelle Bucko) is eager to get off the society beat and cover hard news, even though we find out she’s Pulitzer’s daughter. In “Watch What Happens” she sings of her aspirations and how they align with those of the newsies.
Jack and the others are always on edge concerned that they’ll be snatched up by the corrupt Warden Snyder (Olivia Snyder), who runs The Refuge, a detention center where he pockets the money meant to support his wards.
At one point, they find refuge in a vaudeville house, where Jack sometimes paints scenery for the owner Medda Larkin (Sawyer Scott). She and her Bowery Girls (Maddy Hubley, , Madison Gankosky, and Izzie Douglass) provide their own social commentary in “Just a Pretty Face.”
During the strike, Crutchie ends up in the Refuge, and Jack is afraid he’ll die there, leading him to question the value of the strike.
In the end, they turn Pulitzer’s on medium, the printing press, against him, and make headlines of their own.
And that makes for an engaging piece of theater.
