Newsies

Newsies, at Broadway's Nederlander Theatre 
Gratuitous Violins rating: ***1/2 out of ****

A plucky girl reporter and a story ripped from the pages of the history books. If the musical theatre gods came together to create a show just for me, it would be Newsies.

Unlike some of my friends, I'm a newcomer to Newsies. Until a year ago, I'd never seen the Disney movie and I'd never heard of the event on which it was based, the 1899 newsboys strike in New York City that pitted a ragtag bunch of teens against the press barons Hearst and Pulitzer. While the movie flopped, I enjoyed it.

And watching Newsies onstage was even more fun. It reminded me of the Disney musicals from the Sherman brothers that I loved as a kid: The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band and The Happiest Millionaire. Like Newsies, they combined real-life people and events with incredibly catchy songs, parts of which I could probably still sing.

Now I'll admit this a very traditional musical. It doesn't break new ground for Disney. It's not as imaginative as The Lion King or as magical as Mary Poppins. Tobin Ost's set is basically lots of scaffolding. It's not subtle, either. We don't get deep inside these characters and you don't need a road map to know where the story is heading.

What Newsies does it does with tremendous enthusiasm from beginning to end under Jeff Calhoun's direction. There's electrifying, acrobatic choreography from Christopher Gattelli, a rousing score by Alan Menken and Jack Feldman and plenty of humor amid the pointed social commentary in Harvey Fierstein's book.

How can you not love newsboys singing and dancing their way into your heart for the right to earn a living wage and bargain collectively? Newsies is at its most exciting when they're in midair, leaping and pirouetting and backflipping. I loved the ensemble numbers: "King of New York," "Seize the Day," and "Carry the Banner."

As Jack Kelly, the street-smart ringleader of the newsboys, Jeremy Jordan has a powerful voice and a 1,000-watt smile that made me smile just watching him. Kara Lindsay as the eager cub reporter Katherine is as delightful as I remembered from Little House on the Prairie at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis four years ago.

Sure, some of the portraits are broadly drawn, like John Dossett's Pulitzer, who precipitates the strike by charging the newsies more for the "papes" they hawk in order to increase his profits. And lots of critics have remarked on the similarity to Annie, subbing New York Gov. Theodore Roosevelt for his cousin Franklin.

But you're not going to Newsies for complex character studies. Sometimes there's merit in taking a traditional formula and executing it well. And in its own entertaining way, this is a thought-provoking show. It touches on corporate greed and child labor and the rights of workers to form unions, topics that are certainly in the news today.

Every once in awhile, I like to let down my cynical guard and revel in some good old-fashioned idealism.  Newsies is a testament to the thrill of song and dance but it's also a reminder of how powerful words and images can be, especially when they're used as a force for good.

Little House on the Prairie

Gratuitous Violins rating: *** out of ****

Although I'm a pretty emotional person, there have only been a few times over the past 18 months when something in a play or musical has reduced me to tears. Well, it happened again one week ago today, when I saw the new musical Little House on the Prairie at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

There's a point near the end of Act I, after a bout of scarlet fever has left Mary Ingalls blind, when her younger sister Laura sings to her, "I'll be your eyes." It's such a moving scene, a beautiful duet between Kara Lindsay's Laura and Jenn Gambatese's Mary. For me, it was the most memorable part of lyricist Donna Di Novelli and composer Rachel Portman's score, and I was crying pretty much through the whole song.

In fact, it was so powerful, I was certain that "I'll be your eyes" would mark the end of Act I. But the show went on for what seemed like another half hour. As the mood on the McGuire Proscenium Stage became a more lighthearted one, I think some of the impact of that moment passed by a bit too quickly.

That kind of jarring transition sums up how I felt about Little House on the Prairie - there was lots to like, some truly soaring moments and terrific performances. But at the same time, there were a few things about the musical that just struck me as well, a bit out of place. (Although it's been awhile since I've read all the books so for all I know, they may be true to life.)

Beginning in 1932 with Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote nine books about her childhood, describing her family's travels across the Midwest, what it was like to be a girl in the 1870s and 1880s, her career as a schoolteacher and her marriage to Almanzo Wilder.

The musical covers roughly the events of the middle books, beginning with By the Shores of Silver Lake, when Charles and Caroline Ingalls and their four daughters, including 12-year-old Laura, leave Walnut Grove, Minnesota, for a homestead in the Dakota Territory.

In adapting the work for the stage, book writer Rachel Sheinkin has tinkered a bit with the specifics of Wilder's life. For example, in the books, Mary is stricken with scarlet fever and becomes blind in Minnesota, before the family travels to the Dakotas. And there are only three Ingalls girls in the musical: Mary, Laura and Carrie. Baby Grace has been written out entirely.

Now, I loved Sheinkin's previous book of a musical, for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Sheinkin, who won a Tony award, created a wonderful, quirky, distinct group of adolescents. Their stories were funny and moving and they seemed very true to life. So I was really curious to see how she would approach a group of 19th century adolescents.

In Little House on the Prairie, I don't think she's always successful in capturing the essence of Laura's character. Some things just struck me as out of place, a little too 21st century. While some of the dialog was taken right from the books, other lines seemed a little too modern. I think Sheinkin stumbles a bit in trying to capture a 19th-century sensibility.

For example, there's a scene in a schoolhouse when Laura's nemesis Nellie Oleson, a suitably snobbish Sara Jean Ford, makes fun of the Ingalls girls because they're barefoot and they don't have the proper slates to write on. Coming to her sister Carrie's defense, Laura acts up in a way that was so disruptive, it didn't quite seem believable.

First, I simply don't believe that Caroline Ingalls, who, after all, had been a teacher, would have sent her daughters to school without shoes and without the proper supplies. While Laura was high-spirited and headstrong at times, she was at heart a good girl, well brought up, and would never have been that obnoxious and bratty to an authority figure like a teacher.

There's another song, where the homesteaders, going through a difficult winter, sing "Uncle Sam, Where are you?" While I'm glad that the musical doesn't sugarcoat things, I just don't believe that 19th century homesteaders expected a government bailout.

But despite those qualms, there are lots of things Little House on the Prairie, directed by Francesca Zambello, does right - including depicting the harshness and deprivation and isolation of life in the Dakota Territory.

There's a scene in the beginning of the musical when all of the wagons are filled with pioneers heading west, aided by Adrianne Lobel's imaginative set design. You get a great sense of who they were, how they came from different backgrounds - the wagon train includes European immigrants and African-Americans - but they set off with the same great hopes and dreams. (I did chuckle, though, at a bit of Michele Lynch's choreography in that scene that reminded me of Fiddler on the Roof.)

And Kara Lindsay is so appealing, with a strong, soaring voice. Her Laura is spunky and daring, with an independent streak. I especially loved Lindsay's performance in Act II. At that point, the pigtails are gone and she's transformed into a young woman who becomes a teacher in an even more isolated town, to earn money to help send Mary to a college for the blind.

Even though she's grown up, with more adult responsibilities, Laura is still feisty, still a risk-taker, still an independent-minded person right up until the end of the musical. We see her at first rebuffing and then falling in love with Almanzo, played by a very boyish and charming and confident Kevin Massey. I liked the scene between the two of them in Almanzo's wagon, when Laura takes over the reins and wants to drive the horses as fast as they can go.

The rest of the cast is great, too. Maeve Moynihan is sweet as Carrie, Gambatese's more mature and focused Mary provides a nice counterpoint to Laura's impetuousness in Act I. And I loved Steve Blanchard's strong, forceful Pa. You can definitely tell that Laura gets some of her spunk from him. As Ma, I thought Melissa Gilbert hit the right tone but didn't have quite the same presence as some of the other performers, and her voice seemed a bit thin in her big song, "Wild Child." Still, like everyone else, I remember watching her as television's absolutely adorable Laura, aka "half-pint," and it was very cool to see her on stage.

Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her books to preserve the stories of her childhood, to show succeeding generations how much America had changed in her lifetime. And the musical does a good job of portraying what the lives of those pioneers were like. But what had the most impact on me were the things that are timeless - Laura's adventurous spirit and independence, her devotion to her family and to a sibling who needed her.

Little love for Little House

The musical Little House on the Prairie opened last night at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and unfortunately, the two reviews I could find range from scathing to lukewarm. You can pretty much sum it up this way: mostly praise for the cast, mostly criticism for the music and story.

In the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Dominic P. Papatola finds fault with just about every aspect of the show, from the score by Rachel Portman and Donna Di Novelli, to Tony winner Rachel Sheinkin's book, to the staging by director Francesca Zambello, to Melissa Gilbert's performance in the role of Caroline Ingalls.

"Though it's earnest as all get-out and though the overwhelming majority of the cast is more than up to the task of putting on a top-notch musical, the problems with this show are deep, structural and systemic." Papatola writes.

He's particularly critical of Portman's music. "Far too many of her compositions are song-like collations that are half-formed collections of musical phrases that don't build musically or thematically. Most feel like they're all introduction, cut off before they could develop into a melody. They're often shoehorned into the show as energy boosters or placeholders, rather than as plot-advancers."

Papatola calls Sheinkin's book "a scatter-brained collection of two-dimensional types," and says that Gilbert, obviously brought in for her marquee value, is "without question and by far the weakest link in the casting chain." She sounds "like someone trying to read foreign-language cue cards phonetically."

He does manage a few words of praise for the rest of the cast."Kara Lindsay, the just-out-of-college kid playing Laura, has an endearing spunkiness, plays Laura's various ages well and believably, and has a powerful-but-supple singing voice." And Kevin Massey, as Almanzo Wilder, Laura's love interest, "has a nicely awkward, aw-shucks charm."

In the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Graydon Royce is a bit kinder to the musical - calling it "a quaint throwback of instant nostalgia" and "an exuberant shout-out for rugged individualism all wrapped in a sanitized pageant of good-hearted Americana." Although he has some of the same criticisms of the book and score.

The creative team, Royce says, has "tricked out their proclamation with familiar types: grinning settlers who sweep women off their feet with big hugs; buggy races and July 4th firecrackers followed by the town burgher's call to "Circle round for the square dance!" Yee ha!" The score "has the broad strokes of Copland with its fiddles and hoedowns, and tries to corral a nod to the West with rhythms driven by tom-toms. The melodies, however, are pure Disney."

Still, Royce praises Lindsay, and Jenn Gambatese, who plays her sister Mary, blinded by scarlet fever. He describes their song, "I'll Be Your Eyes," as "a gorgeous duet that hits on every level." While Gilbert's singing "is not first class, Royce says that she "acquits herself absolutely fine." And Steve Blanchard's "broad shoulders and solid jaw" make him "the perfect vehicle to express Charles Ingalls' pioneer quest."

Despite the criticism, I'm keeping an open mind. I'll be in the audience for Little House on the Prairie in just three weeks, during my first-ever trip to Minnesota, and nothing can squelch my excitement. I'll let you know whether the critics have been too harsh or right on the mark.