prim

Feel free to yap about whatever in extensive detail:)

:O

for me?

I'll spare you Victor Hugo level yapping on some random subject and instead talk about how the musical adaptation of newsies took something away from every major character from the original.

Now, I've said several times before that I do not have any hate for the newsies musical and I really do mean it. If you've been here for a while you should know that I really do love the uk production and tutsies, but ultimately I prefer the 1992 movie. Really, I just think that Harvey Fierstein ran into the exact same problem in his adaptation that Kenny Ortega did two decades prior: newsies is just too complex a story with too many multifaceted characters to fit comfortably into a two hour runtime.

I think Fierstein tried too hard to make it fit and in the process had to cut important aspects of several characters. Namely: Jack, David, Medda, Sarah, Denton, Racetrack, and Crutchy. (For now we'll skip over the fact that most of the original ensemble was replaced.)

Beginning with the most obvious cut, Sarah and Denton were replaced with Katherine Plumber/Pulitzer. I personally really love Katherine as a character in her own right, but I think the issue with her replacing Sarah and Denton is that she is an attempt at combining two characters who serve two very different purposes. And the purpose that I think Katherine ends up serving turns out to be something very different too.

Denton is more than just a reporter who decides to report on the newsies strike, he is representative of all of the real adults who supported and aided the 1899 strike. If you aren't too familiar with the history of the 1899 strike, the newsboys' rally at Irving Hall was literally sponsored by the NY state senator, Timothy D. Sullivan (who by the way had once been a newsboy himself). The newsboys (and girls) had a lot of support from adults, and Denton in the film is helping the newsboys not because he's itching to further his career but because he truly believes from the start that the strike is an important story worth writing about. Yes, he gets reassigned and 'betrays' the strike, but he never stops encouraging the newsies to fight for their cause even when he feels he himself no longer can.

Denton is also very important in David's development as a character because Denton's betrayal (which comes before Jack's) is what really forces David to lead and to stop relying on other people to speak for him.

Sarah's purpose is to connect the strike to the other child workers (though admittedly, this isn't very well executed.) Sarah is the one who, in the aftermath of Jack scabbing and in the middle of her brother's anger, discovers Denton's article and becomes a catalyst for the Newsies Banner. It is she who realizes that the strike is so much bigger than Jack and her brother and she who understands it's impact better than anyone else because she's seen both the impact of child labor (being a newsie was actually a pretty good occupation in comparison to the jobs and working conditions of other kids) and the passion that Jack and the strike inspires first hand.

Again, Sarah's role in the film isn't as fleshed out as it should have been because so many of her scenes were cut, but when you fill in the blanks with context clues or by looking back at the scripts and what was cut, the purpose of her character becomes clear.

Keeping all of this in mind, Katherine isn't an adult like Denton and she isn't a child worker like Sarah. Katherine is very different from the both of them and brings an entirely different purpose to the story simply because she is her own character. And this isn't a bad thing by any means, but the meaning that Denton and Sarah brought to the story is lost by not including them. Katherine doesn't really 'replace' Denton and Sarah. So, to get the most out of Newsies, it shouldn't be Denton and Sarah or Katherine. It should be Denton and Sarah and Katherine.

Moving on to Jack and David, what these characters lose in adaptation is pretty similar. Jack visually loses his cowboy hat and bandana which might not seem like a big deal, but it is when you consider what these things represent. Jack's dream of Santa Fe in the film isn't about Santa Fe at all and Santa Fe itself is simply a form of escapism. It's a child's dream. The idealistic dream of a boy who's lost his family and is running from both his past and his fears. Jack also loses his moral ambiguity. In the musical, Jack isn't lying about his name or his family. His family hardly ever comes up and he freely tells Crutchie about his dad. In a way, the musical doesn't let Jack be a child. And not just because he's played by a grown man.

The musical sets Jack up to be misunderstood, he stole food and clothing to help his friends and dreams about Santa Fe because he wants something more out of his life. Yeah, that's fair. That's actually really darn reasonable. Jack isn't a scared little boy anymore, he's a young man who acts with a degree of maturity and clear moral intelligence. I don't like that change.

To me, Jack is seventeen and he feels trapped. He feels like he's suffocating. He has no family and he's left vulnerable because of their loss. 'Cowboy' is a façade to hide his fear. The musical just doesn't portray this as well as the original did.

David also loses a kind of childishness in the musical. Musical David (or Davey) scolds his brother for not wanting to go back to school/thinking being a newsie is better than school. Meanwhile in the film, Mayer Jacobs scolds David for expressing a similar sentiment. Maybe this change was simply to compensate for the exclusion of Mr. and Mrs. Jacobs and somebody had to say that David and Les were going back to school for plot reasons, but it's still at the expense of David. David isn't a parent. At the youngest he's fifteen, and at the oldest he's seventeen. He should be allowed to be selfish. He should be allowed to daydream about leaving school behind and doing something significant, or of being the 'man of the house' like his father. David should also be allowed to get angry and the musical robs him of that opportunity. Katherine's 'betrayal' doesn't effect Davey the way Denton's did and from what we see Jack's betrayal didn't effect him much either. He's disappointed, but he's not allowed to lash out. He's level-headed and reasonable and he knows that the show must go on. He isn't allowed to be impulsive, he isn't allowed to make mistakes, and he isn't important enough for other characters to have to earn his forgiveness.

Now you might be wondering how Medda's character loses anything from film to musical. First, we have to agree that there are really two Meddas. The first Medda is 'Miss Medda Lark[son/in] the Swedish Meadowlark' and the other Medda is the lady behind the stage name.

When Medda is on the stage, she's simply putting on a show. That's her job, after all, and we see this in both the film and the musical. What changes is the Medda we see in between her performances. Both Meddas very clearly care for Jack and the newsies and they are both given moments to show this. However, like the loss of Denton, the musical doesn't give Medda a moment where we see the injustice of how other adults treat the newsies in comparison to Medda. There's a heartbreaking scene in the original film where Medda, in the chaos at the rally, slaps a thug who's attacking Racetrack before she's dragged off the stage and out of harms way. "He's just a child! Can't you see that?" she screams. It's a case of an adult defending the newsies and shows us that these other adults are in the wrong. It's a small thing, but we just don't have an equivalent scene in the stage adaptation. Medda very clearly supports the newsies, but she's never given a scene that lets her directly challenge the adults who are actively harming and silencing the newsies, and I think that's a loss.

Finally, Racetrack and Crutchy(/ie) are both watered down. Racetrack's snark and serious side were projected onto the stage character Albert, leaving Racetrack himself to be mostly portrayed as comic relief. His older brotherly attitude towards Les is also lost.

Crutchy also looses his snark. His is more subtle, but it was still important because Crutchy isn't just a happy-go-lucky ball of sunshine. Remember when Crutchy snarked the Delancey brothers? Remember when he spat in Snyder's sauerkraut? Remember when he told Snyder to make friends with the rats? He also loses the line "I don't want nobody carrying me. Never, ya hear?" It's so important that Crutchy had pride, that he didn't want his friends to pity him or treat him any differently because of his disability. It's so important that his friends respected him and never did, even if they were just trying to help out of love for their friend. It's so important that Crutchy was defiant, that he fought back in his own ways.

The 1992 movie just got it so right

Let him steal peoples horses and convince david or kathy or sarah whoever to hop on the back. Have him obsessively learning to lasso at the lodge or during slow selling days. He learned cowboy slang and sayings and throws a fit when he cant find his cowboy hat thinking someone stole it. He calls David his beau and likes giving david his hat because it feels significant.