opera ghost

look at this panel. normal, right? however. consider this:

first off, please take this with a grain of salt since i haven't seen the proshot in a while.

you can see in the prologue through carrying the banner that jack and crutchie are rarely more than five feet apart from each other and always blocked side by side, right? that changes the moment davey comes in. it's consistent throughout the rest of the show as well.

the thing that irks me the most for stupid reasons is jack not putting crutchie in a higher position in the strike committee but immediately making davey his co-leader and les the secretary of state. we see this in the world will know when the three of them (but no crutchie) go to negotiate with pulitzer.

in act two, jack is really only upset about losing crutchie in the scene before watch what happens reprise until davey comes along. sure, crutchie is part of the reason he takes pulitzer's bribe, but it's also about the jacobs getting thrown into the refuge with crutchie.

in the end, it's davey who convinces jack to stay. it's davey who has the last line of the show. it's davey who is jack's ultimate motivator to the finish line.

to me, it just reads like the writers kinda forgot about crutchie and his relationship with jack? or a bit of their more distant dynamic from the movie bled through. i think that if newsies was actually written well (which it's not but that's a whole different thing), crutchie would be more central in the story and in jack's mind.

Especially in the stage version of Newsies, we can establish that Jack and Crutchie are really close with each other, but we don't really see that, which I find sad and disappointing.

getting chewed out for giving a child a gun? pose

a friend of yours causing a clear fire hazard right in front of your front door? complete and utter exasperation but make it a slay

threatening someone in a bar? look at that walk

asking a random guy for help? yes but can't forget that flair

the freaky demon you have a deal with just threatened the child you live with? serving cunt

and we don't even need to talk about this one:

Yes!! I liked Lindsay Ellis's and Dominic Noble's summary of everything Phantom but they did our boy so dirty by stereotyping him as the jerk who calls Christine a disgraced slut and a commoner opera-wench in every scene they're in together.

Exhibit A: he doesn't call her a slut, and in even implying it he knows it's wrong and he judges himself as stupid

Exhibit B: He apologizes and respects her boundaries. I feel like even my favorite media review bloggers keep on missing this part. Raoul didn't even have to kidnap Christine and tie her up to get this epiphany for himself. She just had to look tired at him. Get you a partner who backpedals when you look sad and tired at him.

Exhibit C: how many estates does this guy even have? he's offering one up for like a 19th-century witness protection program, and when Raoul says that he'll finally (finally!) accept the friendzoning — which he should have done sooner, but better late than never ain't that right Erik? — then i actually believe the insolent boy

and secondly, yes yes my little narrative devices erik and raoul, I love thinking about how similar they are, in a "when I look at you I see everything I could be if my situation was different. I would act just like you given the circumstances. and I hate that" way

For the story to work, we need to see Marvin and Whizzer's blatant passion for and attraction to each other to understand how their relationship dynamic functions. If you strip away all the sexuality from the lyrics and performance, they're just two people yelling at each other who, for some unknown reason, will not break up. They aren't all over each other on stage just because it's hot, their sexuality is a storytelling device used to show the audience how the passion in their relationship keeps driving them back to each other even as their personalities clash.