So, I was in the city twice last week to go do some live entertainment -- which means there will be no movies for the next couple of weeks, since it's about fifty dollars a pop for me, as a broke college student, to do the city -- and, on my friend's insistence, one of the shows I went to see was the Disney musical Newsies.
She adores it beyond words, and, while my love of the show isn't as huge and all-encompassing, it's still an excellent show on pretty much every account. Tony-winning choreography, awesome lyrics, a message I can totally get behind, and a love interest character who is much, much more than that. I'd probably go see it again, if I had the opportunity to get equally good seats for equally cheap as I got through my university's Student Activities Board.
I'll start with the easy stuff -- like production design and acting and choreography and music.
The set is an ingenious set of towers and platforms that form everything from the house where the Newsies sleep to the basement of Pulitzer's mansion. I was very impressed with the way the towers were used, and it may be my favorite set that I've seen on stage (note: I've only seen Wicked and In the Heights in terms of professional musicals). It also helps highlight the impressive physicality of the choreography and blocking -- the newsies spend a good portion of the show where they're not dancing running up and down flights and flights of stairs.
As for the music and choreography? I totally get why the choreography got a Tony, and there are few songs that get to me on a visceral level the way "Watch What Happens" and "The World Will Know" do. I was impressed from a "whoa that was hard" standpoint as much as from a "excellent point made, good job."
A lot of those points have to do with rebellion and iconoclasm, which, if you've read my post about the Les Mis movie, you'll know are some of my favorite themes in fiction. "The World Will Know" is all about Jack Kelly and his newsies deciding to stand up for themselves against the Kingmakers of the turn-of-the-century Manhattan press -- namely, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal. You don't get much more David and Goliath than that, and it's handled excellently.
But the part I loved the most about this show was Katherine Plumber, ostensibly the protagonist's love interest but in truth much more than that.
Katherine is a reporter for the New York Sun, a rival paper to the World and the Journal, and she becomes involved in the strike when she meets Jack after hearing the story. They'd met once before, at the vaudeville show Katherine had been reviewing, but she was more offended by his attention than anything else at first. The development of their romance is almost incidental to her role in the plot, and for that I am incredibly thankful.
Also excellent is the fact that despite Katherine being a female reporter, her gender is hardly even talked about, beyond a few offhand comments she makes in "Watch What Happens." She's aware of the mold she's breaking, but it's not the centerpiece of her character any more than her romance with Jack is. In fact, there is no one central facet of her character to be found -- she's multifaceted and strong and flawed, and it's refreshing to see that in a love interest even these days. She becomes part of the larger group, too, not through Jack, but by herself in the number "King of New York," and a good portion of plot development occurs offstage between her and Davey while Jack is busy being totally useless to anyone but his internal character arc.
Katherine is a strong female character without being a Strong Female Character (TM), and that's pretty much the best thing ever.
I also love this show for how topical it is for our era, even though it's set at the turn of the last century, because the issues it raises about the press and about social change are still almost too relevant. The Kingmakers now are the corporate media and the kings they make are the politicians they support. Seeing the newsies and Katherine stand up to their Kingmakers is inspiring to those of use who write for change and never get seen by the mainstream media because we're different, or because our stories won't sell papers or advertisements, or get hits on the big web sites, or support one candidate or another in an election year.
Today's muckrakers are almost invariably bloggers, the Internet having in a lot of ways replaced the print newspaper in terms of getting news to people. There's a whole new wide world of information out there, and Newsies perpetually reminds me that there are always alternatives to the big corporate conglomerates, and, as someone who does care -- a lot -- about social change and progress, that's a pretty important thing.
I also love that the Newsies and Katherine are as young as they are, and that Katherine says in "Watch What Happens" that the mistake her father's generation made is that they got old, and that she's not going to make that same mistake, because it's true. It's the young who are the face of any revolution, and we have to remind ourselves to keep our minds young in order to keep seeing where progress and change need to go. There's no such thing as utopia; there will never be a point where we can stop and say we've fixed everything.
I love that Newsies reminds me of those things, and that it does so with such subtlety and skill.
Overall, I'd put this in my top three favorite musical anythings (the other two being Les Mis and In the Heights, sorry Wicked), and have to recommend it to anyone who's into musical and even to people who aren't.
No comments:
Post a Comment