"Now's the Time to Seize the Day"

Newsies is a newer musical that made it’s first debut in 2011 and it’s broadway debut in 2012.  Newsies was written by Harvey Fierstein with music written by Alan Menken and lyrics created by Jack Feldman. The musical is about a group of Newsboys who go on strike in New York city.  These newsboys are working to support themselves and their families.  They have little money and have to pay for the papers.  They themselves pay attention to the news because an interesting story means more people want to buy newspapers. The last topic is the railroad strike.  They see that new topic is a raise in the price of newspapers.  This causes the main character, Jack Kelly, to start a strike of their own.   However, they are not well known.  To be successful, they need to be in the newspaper.  This is where Katherine Plumber comes in.  When she firsts meets Jack Kelly, he is running from her father, Joseph Pulitzer.  She introduces herself as just a writer, but she is the daughter of the person who raised the price of Newspapers.  She is unlike her father.  She works to make a living by her own choice.  She believes that the raise in prices was unfair.  Katherine and Jack lead the other Newsies into printing a paper on Pulitzer’s old printing press.  In the end, the Newsies make the front page of the newspaper and their strike is successful.  Pulitzer agrees to lower the price to halfway in between the original price and the new price.  In addition, he will not raise the price in the near future. 

    The performance of Disney’s musical at the Bushnell in Hartford was phenomenal.  This performance of Newsies was my first time watching the show and I was very pleased.  The choreography, and the set stood out the most to me.  The dancing was amazing.  The entire cast was extremely talented.  The choreography seemed very complex.  The dancing consisted of several jumps and acrobatic maneuvers.  From experience, I know how hard these maneuvers are difficult.  The actors not only completed these tricks with graceful form, they also performed these trick simultaneously with one another.  In my opinion, the best maneuver was the double cartwheel.  I think this because I attempted this maneuver with a friend and we could not get the second person into a cartwheel.  The actors went all the way across the stage.  One final thought about the acrobatics is that no actors messed a maneuver up.  This incredibly good considering that they do this each night and are not trying to successful do the trick once.

    Another part of the show that stood out to me was the set.  The set was very simple.  It consisted of three metal staircases.  These staircases spun and moved forward and backward.  This added many dimensions to the stage.  Besides using only the bottom of the stage the actors used all levels of the steps.  In addition, the staircases spun, this helped to create chaos in the chase scenes.  A few other set pieces were used, but the stairs were the main part of the stage.  They made the stage appear more spacious than it was.   

    In conclusion, I enjoyed the show.  Since it was the first time I saw the show, I could not notice any potential mistakes and I have nothing to compare it to.  I would enjoy seeing the show again. 

 

Source: Google Images

Playbill +Wikipedia(for the writers)