Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
The dominant story of the Newsies movie — Disney’s live-action original musical from 1992 about the newsboys’ strike of 1899 — is one of failure. Disney launched this original musical after having revived their feature animation division (original musicals themselves) to wild success with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and Beauty and the Beast in 1991 (Aladdin would continue Disney animation’s winning streak in November of ’92). But far from replicating the success of the animated musicals, Newsies bombed in every way a movie could bomb: critically loathed (39% on Rotten Tomatoes) and an absolute financial crater. It opened in 13th place on its opening weekend — 25 years ago today — behind such luminaries as non-Disney animated films like Ferngully and Rock-a-Doodle.* It ended up making only $2 million domestic off of a $15 million budget.
And yet somehow, as a ’90s kid growing up on the Disney Channel — which aired Newsies approximately twice daily — I had no idea of Newsies‘ dirt-poor reputation. Much in the same way as my youth shielded me from knowing just how bad Hook was supposed to be, I had no idea Newsies was such a legendary failure. So instead, I let the songs seep into my brain, I basked in the youthful but unmistakable star energy of Christian Bale, and I kicked up my heels (you know, internally).
*Not for nothing, though, the box-office top 10 from the week Newsies opened is so 1992 it hurts: Basic Instinct, White Men Can’t Jump, Beethoven, Wayne’s World, The Cutting Edge, My Cousin Vinny, Ladybugs, and the Dolly Parton/James Woods romantic comedy Straight Talk. God bless us, everyone.
But re-approaching Newsies as an adult is a tough one. This is a movie that the great Roger Ebert called “warmed-over Horatio Alger” in a review dripping with sarcasm. EWcalled it‘s Owen Gleiberman “hollow and slightly absurd.” It’s also 121 minutes for about … three good songs? Two and a reprise? I can’t deny that watching Newsies as an adult adds a whole new level of vicarious embarrassment to the proceedings. The first five minutes are jam-packed with roughly one thousand old-timey-street-urchin wisecracks from the gathered newsies — much talk of “papes” and “me muddah” and other howlers from children who appear to have learned their period-appropriate Noo Yawk accents from … well, mo go-to joke for this thing is “the movie Newsies,” so I don’t know where to go with this analogy except to say that it’s ridiculous.
So how, then, to approach a defense of Newsies on its 25th anniversary? Is there a way to argue that this earnest, hoofing, admirably energetic movie was in any way misunderstood by critics or unjustly ignored by audiences? At the very least, the fact that we’re still talking about Newsies in 2017 says something about how it’s been able to cling to the back pages of pop culture memory. But is there any way to say it’s good?
On Newsies As a Tribute to Cheese in the Face of Cynicism
The most immediate and pervasive sense of revulsion one has to Newsies isn’t about the songs — Alan Menken’s work here isn’t near the level he’d been doing on Disney’s animated movies, but he produces a handful of good ones, from “The World Will Know” to “King of New York” — or the soundstage version of New York City, or the uneven performances from the young actors. It’s mostly about how unbearably earnest and cheese it all is. Director Kenny Ortega (who directed this and Hocus Pocus back to back and then was in director jail until they let him make the High School Musical movies) is addicted to shots of hoofing youths and hopeful faces. The fun feels forced, the dialogue and language sounds absurd, and the deck is stacked for maximum audience sympathy (a kid and a character on crutches?).
It’s almost unbearable to sit through, and yet … are we only reacting to that through the cynical lenses we’ve all chosen to wear these days? Movie musicals used to be big, lavish cheese-fests about carousels and music men and the state of Oklahoma. Is there really no room in our hearts for a bunch of soot-faced newsboys fighting for their right to unionize? Which brings me to my next line of defense …
On Newsies as an Object Lesson in Originality Versus Nostalgia
If 1992’s Newsies were an adaptation of a beloved stage musical, or even a remake of a movie musical from the ’50s or ’60s, I wonder if it would have been savaged the same way. There’s an aggressive old-fashioned-ness to Newsies that feels all wrong for 1992, even setting aside the fact that it’s set at the end of the 19th century. Stylistically, there was nothing ’90s about Newsies. The heroes were too uncomplicated. The crises were too predictable. The villains — Oscar-winner Robert Duvall glowers from behind his beard in his office building like he’s Monty Burns — too cartoonish. We tend to forgive all of these things if they’re referencing older cheesy projects, but not if they’re brand new works. A great case in point for this, of course, is the Newsies musical, which was received far more positively when it hit broadway in 2012. Yes, there’s more of an allowance for old-fashioned corniness on the stage, but it’s also that the musical was referencing something that was already dated.
On Newsies as an Artifact of Christian Bale’s Humble Beginnings
Christian Bale was a celebrated child actor after starring in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, but his career was all but dead after the twin disasters of Newsies and Swing Kids in the early 1990s. Those two movies together — Swing Kids was a rather ill-conceived movie about young people in pre-WWII Germany who were into both swing dancing and the ascendant Nazi party — were a kind of song-and-dance one-two punch, and their failure sent Bale off in a completely different direction. It wasn’t until he started making arty and challenging movies like Velvet Goldmine and American Psycho that his career began to revive. Watching Bale croon his heart out in Newsies is like peeking into an alternate universe that never came to be, where instead of becoming the kind of immersive, starve-yourself-to-death-for-The Machinist actor, Bale instead found wild success as a musicals guy.
On Newsies as Cautionary Tale for Defying the “Babe, District Attorney, Driving Miss Daisy Paradigm
By far the most puzzling and frankly unsettling part of Newsies is the Ann-Margaret interlude, playing a friendly burlesque dancer with a soft spot for the newsies. The movie makes a lot of hay about how these teens and tweens all had to grow up a lot faster back then, working and smoking and drinking like adults by the age of thirteen and all. But underlining that point by having them not only gawk at dancing ladies but make a few uncomfortable allusions about their familiarity with Ann-Margaret’s character is … puzzling at best. Still, credit the actress for brazenly defying the rules for actresses her age. She was just north of 50, but already being cast in movies like Grumpy Old Men by the time this movie came out. Good for her for not simply wading into her dowager years. Now go sex up that teenage Christian Bale!
