Sunny D 🧸🍯

in 92sies, it’s made very clear that santa fe isn’t actually a place jack wants to go, rather a place he uses to cope with the feeling of being alone and not having a family. you deduce this from its timing in the movie and the lyrics in the song. the song comes right after jack leaves the jacobs’ home. the very first verse of it is:

so that’s what they call a family mother, daughter, father, son guess that everything you heard about is true

so you ain’t got any family well who said you needed one ain’t you glad nobody’s waiting up for you

this is right after the first time he’s had a real experience being around and involved in a family in a long time. right after we see him happily jump back into the family dynamic, happily pretending that he is apart of this family. you can see these are words he doesn’t actually mean, but rather words he’s using to assure himself that he’s okay with being alone, and not having what they have, even though that’s not true. (see lyrics: when i dream | on my own | i’m alone but i ain’t lonely)

and we know it’s not true because he lies about having a family waiting for him, and he tells sarah that he’s not used to whether he goes or stays mattering to anyone, and asks her if it would matter to her. in that scene, he’s asking her this because he doesn’t want to leave, he’s just waiting for someone to ask him to stay because he wants a reason to. he wants to matter to someone, and if that someone is in new york, he won’t leave because he doesn’t actually want santa fe, he wants a family. he wants to belong somewhere, and he knows that running off to santa fe isn’t going to fix that, he just hopes that it will because he’s never mattered enough to anyone else for them to ask him not to go.

in the last verse, he sings:

so you ain’t got any family ain’t you glad you ain’t that way ain’t you glad you got a dream called santa fe

once again, reaffirming that his actual want is to be loved by and belong to a family, not santa fe.

the importance of all this subtext and context clues comes from it’s placement in the movie. had it come at a different time in the movie, the song may have had a very different meaning, but it was put there on purpose. to show that he is just a kid who was forced to grow up too fast, who works for a society who continues to fail him, who just wants to be able to have someone who cares about him and wants him to stay, and who wants have a life where he doesn’t feel so alone, abandoned, or ostracized. that’s why the song(s) is so heart wrenching.

the song wasn’t about santa fe. it was never about santa fe, the song was about longing for a family, something he didn’t have the luxury of.

in livesies, they actively make it a place where jack genuinely wants to go, and where he thinks he can fix all his problems. and obviously there is nothing inherently wrong with that idea, but it does take out the emotional weight of what santa fe actually means to him, and what it’s actually a metaphor for.

both the movie and the show have two versions of the song, however changing the placements of where they are and changing the lyrics, changes the meaning of not only the song (obviously), but also the meaning of santa fe in the show and to the character themselves.

in the broadway show, jack is literally singing about santa fe. in the santa fe prologue, he’s singing about how much he wants to leave new york, and how it sucked the life out of his old man and that he’s not letting it do that to him. he sings about how all he wants to do is just get away to a place that sounds so much better, so much prettier and so much cleaner and where he’ll be able to live free with not a care in the world, unlike what he has now.

see lyrics:

where it's clean and green and pretty

plantin' crops splittin' rails swappin' tales around the fire ‘cept for sunday when you lie around all day

and

work the land chase the sun swim the whole rio grande just for fun

there is one verse in the prologue that alludes to wanting to belong to a family, and wanting someone to care enough to ask you to stay, however, it is a short lyric that is quickly overshadowed by jack telling crutchie:

i bet a few months of clean air you could toss that crutch for good

(which i cant even begin to explain why that’s a terrible lyric, and why it’s just not good representation in general. a friend of mine who is disabled has explained it better than i have the ability to, and i’ll link their post if you’re curious about that.)

the family line, does not get a lot of spotlight, and is drowned out by the sheer amount of praise being sung about the actual place, santa fe. jack wants to leave. he doesn’t want to stay, and he wants to take crutchie with him. in fact, he does call crutchie family:

don’t you know that we’re a family would i let you down

which continues to drown out the other family line in the song, because this line shows that jack thinks of crutchie as family, and implies that family is not something he desires at this point because he already has it, and if it is something he wants, it’s not nearly as important to him as getting out of the city. it’s also important to note that this is the very first song in the show. this sets the mood for the entire play. you get this sense the whole time that jack does not want to be there.

now, yes in the movie jack does say that he’ll be happy when the strike is over so he can leave for santa fe, but that comment is almost immediately followed up by him telling sarah that he’s not used to him staying or leaving mattering to anyone, and that’s why he said that. because people don’t normally care.

and this is not a dig on movie jack for “not considering the newsies family”, so i hope that’s not how that came off. because i do think that he does consider the other newsies family, especially given how he treats them throughout the movie. that being said, it’s not the same as having a mother, and a father, and a real home of your own. that’s the distinction between jack longing for a family in the movie, and jack already considering himself having a family in the broadway show.

when jack sings the reprise in the movie, it’s coming straight after the rally has failed, and he has been arrested. after he cuts david off in order to keep him out of the refuge, and his one chance to be apart of a family again is seemingly off the table. though he hasn’t scabbed yet, the look on david’s face when he turns to leave is a enough to insinuate that there is bitterness or resentment in feeling like jack is giving up, and leaving him, and their strike. he falls back on that dream of santa fe because his real dream is no longer tangible.

he’s in the refuge, the place that he was so scared of going back to, and he feels completely hopeless, and powerless in this moment. pulitzer and snyder have completely broken him down. he can no longer keep up the facade of being okay with everything happening in his life (we see crutchy’s reaction to this), he knows what he’s about to do next and that his friends aren’t going to understand why he’s doing this. he knows they’ll be rightfully hurt and they won’t forgive him, and so this place, santa fe, is all he feels he has left. everything else has been unwilling stripped from him.

this wholly differs from santa fe in the musical, where jack is coming from a place of anger, guilt, and some self pity. he wants to go to santa fe because he wants to run away from his problems. he doesn’t want to deal with any of this stuff anymore, and he’s mad at crutchy from not being able to escape. but the thing is, santa fe was jack’s real dream in the musical. it wasn’t a stand in for anything. he’s not singing about santa fe because he lost the only thing keeping his head above water, he’s singing about santa fe because he is at the end of his rope with pulitzer, and he just wants out. he has lost his patience. but he knows what he wants, and where he wants to go.

now, i don’t think there’s anything wrong with being mad and outraged for being mistreated by those who are more fortunate than you. obviously, that’s the whole premise of newsies and why they striked to begin with, and i’ve been on that end personally before. that being said, i think by changing what santa fe meant to jack for the broadway musical, it just lost so much of the emotional weight that came with it.

jack stays in new york in the movie because he never truly wanted to leave. he wanted a family, and he realizes, with some help from roosevelt, he finally has that. he’s not giving up his dream by staying, because he already found his dream. but in the musical, because they painted santa fe as something that he actually wanted. it feels like he’s giving that up for virtually nothing because he had never expressed wanting a girlfriend, wanting a family, or wanting to stay. yes he was offered a job, but he genuinely thought moving to santa fe would make his life better, that it would make his friends lives better. he listed out all the reasons he wanted to leave new york in the santa fe prologue. it never had anything to do with the strike, or with the price of the papes, but rather with the city itself, so why stay if you’ve never been shown to have any incentive to want to? why stay if you genuinely believe the quality of life is better elsewhere, especially when you have the opportunity to leave?