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“Newsies” the musical continues this weekend in Hazleton. And in Duryea.
The show, which depicts New York City’s newsboy strike of 1899, is appearing at both the Pennsylvania Theatre of Performing Arts and at the Phoenix Performing Arts Center.
That means you have several chances to see some exuberant dancing — with high kicks, split leaps, hands-free cartwheels and even Crutchie, the one lame newsie, managing to jump over his own bum leg — and learn a bit of history at the same time.
“You had to buy them yourself,” 10-year-old Gabe Keezer of Exeter said, explaining how newsies had to dig into their own meager funds to purchase the newspapers they hawked.
“You had to pay for them whether you sold them or not,” said 17-year-old Josiah Carminati of Wyoming.
“Mostly convincing people to buy them” was probably the hardest part of the job, said Sawyer Scaramastro, 9, of Wilkes-Barre.
Those young cast members, all from the Phoenix production in Duryea, said they’ve learned how difficult the life of a newsie was near the dawn of the 20th century.
As the musical’s plot develops, the young entrepreneurs’ working lives are about to become much more difficult.
Joseph Pulitzer — portrayed by Zach Sessock in Hazleton and Tim Neel in Duryea — is getting his hair trimmed by a barber, in his office, when he decides to trim the newsies’ profits, forcing them to sell more papers to earn the same money.
Led by a natural leader named Jack Kelly — portrayed by 18-year-old DJ Elliot of Bear Creek in the PTPA show and by 18-year-old Sarah Neel of Wyoming in the Phoenix show — and guided by a newcomer newsie named Davey who has the benefit of more education, the newsies unite and vote to strike.
This being a musical, the strike gives them more to sing and dance about, as well as the inspiration to tear newspapers apart with their feet.
“I saw the show when it was on Broadway a few years back,” said Samantha Schugardt, director of the PTPA production. “Being the dancer I am, I went for the choreography. But not only was the dancing phenomenal and amazing, I was blown away by the vocals. It’s amazingly gripping music.”
The show recently became available to amateur theatrical groups, and Schugardt and Lee LaChette, the director at Phoenix, who also has a strong dance background, were both eager to stage the dance-heavy show.
Adding to Schugardt’s enthusiasm was the fact that “we have a decent amount of guys, not just one or two but a whole group of men who can sing and dance. We dress up some girls as newsies, too, but we have the guys who are able to carry it off.”
Carrying it off quite admirably in rehearsal, PTPA’s DJ Elliot said he’s “actually not a trained dancer, but more into martial arts and parkour.”
Elliot, who is a musical theatre major at DeSales University, explained parkour, which developed from military training exercises, is a style of natural, efficient movement that can be compared to “the way a child plays tag or the way a prehistoric man would have hunted.”
“I asked for lessons as a Christmas present a few years ago,” he said, adding he is a parkour instructor himself now.
The Jack Kelly character becomes romantically involved with a reporter who is sympathetic to the newsies’ cause and calls herself Katherine Plumber. That’s not her real name. Her real last name is Pulitzer.
She wouldn’t have had to work, said Brooke Taylor, who portrays Katherine at Phoenix. “Her father (the newspaper owner) would just give her money.”
But, “she’s a feminist,” said Elizabeth Hines, 20, of Mountain Top, who portrays Katherine for PTPA. “She wants to work. She wants to be an independent woman and she wants to help people. She’s ready for the dawn of a new century.”
The character isn’t really based on a member of the Pulitzer family, Hines said, but on Nellie Bly, pen name of the 19th-century journalist Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, who entered an insane asylum as an inmate in order to report on the conditions there.
“The story shows the power of the press,” said Michael Ecker, 19, a King’s College student from Quakake, who portrays the scholarly newsie, Davey, at PTPA. “And there’s a lesson about being patient and working together. And compromise.”
