There are certain limitations to high school theater.
Usually, when you get a chance to see talented teen- agers take on the best of Broadway, you see them wearing clothes designed to make them look older, inhabiting the roles of adults often twice their age.
The exuberance of youth gets forced into an older body and sometimes loses some of the specialness that makes youth, youth.
So it really does feel special to watch Mingus students star in Newsies, a musical where nearly the whole cast actually does play teenagers. Adults could not play these roles. Only a high school theater production, with the bright-eyed enthusiasm and occasional cracked voices of adolescence, can interpret the troupe of enterprising youngsters eager to join together and change the world.
Newsies puts the Mingus theater students in raggedy clothes [sewn in-house by other students] and exaggerated old-timey “New Yawk” accents as they play out the true story of the 1899 newsboy strike, when hundreds of children employed selling papers for Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World went on strike following the company raising the prices at which newsies could buy their papers to then sell, significantly cutting into their profits.
The teenage unionizers eventually got thousands of child laborers throughout the city to join them in a general strike and exacted concessions out of Pulitzer and fellow newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst.
In 1992, Disney released a movie musical based on the strike, with music by Alan Menken, which was adapted into a Broadway musical in 2012 by Harvey Feirstein and Jack Feldman. With the rights to the stage version becoming available last March, Mingus is one of the first high schools in the country to perform the show.
Alex Lloyd plays Jack Kelly, the de facto leader of the newsboys who organizes his “ragtag gang of ragamuffins who want to take on the kingmakers of New York,” as the kids are described by the female lead, Katherine Plumber [Joanna Westling], a reporter following the strike in the hopes of catching a great story. Both Lloyd and Westling play characters trying to act older and more respectable than they are, Jack with a tough street- wise exterior and Katherine with the guarded spiciness of a woman in a world that was not ready for female reporters.
But the true joy of both performances comes from the youthful earnestness underneath the rough exteriors. Jack dreams of leaving the streets of New York for an idyllic life in Santa Fe, while Katherine’s initial spiciness gives way for the sweetness of her strikingly professional-sounding voice in songs like “Watch What Happens” and her duet with Jack, “Something to Believe In.”
But, even with talented leads, the true focus of the show is the large ensemble of titular newsies, who not only sing a recital of catchy songs, but go above and beyond with choreography that lifts them up off the stage.
Few songs end without flips and cartwheels from actors on stage, a spat of acrobatic stage combat or a tap solo. Director James Ball and his team of choreographers had been planning on this show for over a year, training the kids in advanced dance moves long before auditions, and it shows.
Special mention must be made of the one actor who never dances, Joseph Pulitzer himself, played by Aiden Skoch. In a cast that cannot spend a moment still, Skoch commands power sitting down, exuding a goateed menace that makes one of the few teenagers playing a full adult capture the whole stage whenever he is on it.
But the Mingus stage belongs to the kids. It belongs to the exuberant praxis of children working hard for a cause they believe in, whether it be workers rights for newsies or just the opportunity to put on an excellent musical for the community. In 1899, the newsies captured the hearts of New York and showed how valuable they were and now, 120 years later, the Mingus theater students do the same.
Newsies has three remaining productions on April 12 and 13 at 7 p.m. and April 14 at 3 p.m. Tickets are $12 for adults, $11 for children, and $8 for children if bought in advance. Advance tickets can be purchased at www. showtix4u.com/events/atort, in person at the MUHS bookstore or by calling the box office at 649-4466.
Jon Hecht can be reached at 634-8551 or email jhecht@larsonnewspapers.com
