April 10 - Newsies

Image copyright Disney

On this day, in 1992, Walt Disney Pictures released a brand new musical, Newsies. Staring a young Christian Bale (and established actors such as Bill Pullman, Ann Margret and Robert Duvall), Newsies is loosely based on the New York City newsboy strike of 1899. With over a dozen songs written by the incomparable Alan Menken and Jack Feldman, this movie, 64 years into the company’s history, would be the first completely live action musical ever filmed by Disney. The film also marked the directorial debut of Kenny Ortega, who, up to this point, had choreographed films like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Dirty Dancing and would later helm Hocus Pocus and the High School Musical series. With its peppy songs and highly talented cast, I’d like to be able to report that Newsies took the box office by storm. It did not. It only had a budget of $15 million and couldn’t even scrape that together. After barely grossing $2.8 million, Newsies limped off the big screen to languish on the dust heap of Hollywood with the rest of the failures. Except that turned out to be another thing it did not do.

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The home video market was a boon to movies in more ways than one. Not only could studios gain extra income on a picture long after theaters were no longer showing it, but films that might not have gotten the attention they deserved the first time around received a second chance at life. Don’t get me wrong, here, a terrible movie on the big screen generally remained terrible at home and people who had the misfortune of renting it said “Well, now we know why it came and went so fast. That’s two bucks we’ll never get back.” But every once in a while, a quirky movie like Clue or an underappreciated historical musical like Newsies came along and home video gave viewers the chance to find plenty to love. A small but rabid cult following began to grow around Newsies (and Clue too, but this post doesn’t concern that gem), looking for a way to honor the object of their affection. It didn’t take them long to figure out what they wanted.

Image copyright Disney

When Beauty and the Beast made the leap from the big screen to the Broadway stage in 1995, most of the theater world was unprepared for the onslaught of adaptations that was to come. Once The Lion King and Mary Poppins had cemented that kind of move as a solid thing, Disney began looking around for other properties to make the transition. Fansies (as followers of Newsies have become known) had long been campaigning for their beloved movie to join the ranks of the Broadway bound. Finally, Disney agreed to resurrect what they considered to be a flop. They hired Alan Menken and Jack Feldman to write more songs and got Harvey Fierstein to write the book. The talented trio worked their magic and by the time Newsies: The Musical was in previews at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey in 2011, it was already a Tony contender (even though it wouldn’t open on Broadway for several more months.

Image courtesy nytimes.com

Newsies: The Musical ran for three years on Broadway, logging in just over 1,000 performances. It was nominated for eight Tony Awards (winning two) and six Drama Desk Awards (again, winning two). Following the close of the Broadway run, Newsies: The Musical then toured North America, playing another 784 times in 65 cities over two years. A performance in Los Angeles was filmed and shown in theaters for one weekend only in February 2017. Over the four days of limited theatrical release, Newsies: The Musical grossed almost $3.5 million. For those of you that are counting, that’s several hundred thousand more than the original film grossed in its entire run. It’s safe to say that Disney no longer considers their little David and Goliath story a flop (and it only took 25 years to prove them wrong).