Sean Hayes (Getty Images)

Emmy-winning actor Sean Hayes will be joining the second season of NBC's musical comedy(?) Smash, a show that is already best known as a punchline on 30 Rock. Can the Will & Grace star save the show from campy demise?

Joining former co-star Debra Messing, Mr. Hayes (best known to the world as Will & Grace's Jack, or possibly the voice of the evil Mr. Tinkles from Cats & Dogs) has an uphill battle in order to help save Smash from its slumping numbers, which fell off after a much-touted premiere.

According to The Hollywood Reporter:

Hayes will play Terrence Falls, a comedic TV and film star who is making his Broadway debut in the musical Liaisons, based on the novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses. However, due to a series of comedic circumstances, he becomes a thorn in the side of Megan Hilty's Ivy and other characters.

First of all ... a musical version of Dangerous Liaisons is hysterical already. We wonder how many Cruel Intentions jokes will be cracked in Mr. Hayes' first episode. (Answer: a lot, probably.)

Secondly, we're looking forward to seeing how Newsies' Jeremy Jordan will hold up opposite Mr. Hayes, as well as finding out who the final replacement lead—known only as a "African American female chorus member"—will be.

Jeremy Jordan, Newsie, will be joining the cast of 'Smash'

Smash, the NBC Monday night show that will be going on to a second season despite all evidence that it should have been canceled three episodes in, is getting a new star. Jeremy Jordan, currently starring in Broadway's Newsies, will be joining the cast of Smash, helping replace Jaime Cepero and Raza Jaffrey and Brian D’Arcy James (Ellis, Dev, and Frank, respectively), who are leaving the show.

According to TVLine.com:

His character is one of three roles being added under new showrunner Josh Safran. The other newbies, a gay male Broadway dreamer and an African-American female chorus member, have yet to be cast.

No word yet on who Mr.Jordan will be portraying in the new season, but our guess is that he'll be playing Danny, described as "a straight, working class fella in his mid-20s and from Brooklyn. He is summed up as 'sexy, charismatic and musically gifted, but also self-destructive and remote.'"

Newsies vs. Newsies

“Pulitzer and Hearst, they think we’re nothing! Are we nothing?”

“No!”

The opening chords of “The World Will Know,” the anthem of 1992’s live-action Disney film Newsies, are as recognizable to a generation of cult fans as “A Whole New World,” “Under the Sea” or Celine Dion crooning “Beauty and the Beast.”

Led by Christian Bale’s horrendous “New Yoik” accent, first-time director Kenny Ortega’s film about the 1899 newsboy strike was, superficially, a huge flop. It cost $15 million to make and brought in only $2 million at the box office. And the critics hated it: Roger Ebert called it  “warmed-over Horatio Alger” and included his review in his 2000 book, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie!

David Rooney of The New York Times was even harsher, saying that the film “suffers from sluggish storytelling, a vocally challenged cast (led by an uncomfortable-looking Christian Bale) and poorly shot dance numbers bursting with anachronisms.

“It’s Oliver! meets Annie with quasi-breakdance moves,” he added derisively.

Yet somehow the cult of Newsies survived the film and now, two decades later, it’s back and headed for Broadway; the show begins previews next week at the Nederlander Theater. And this time, it has the whole world on its side.

When the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey premiered a revamped Newsies: The Musical last September, the most obvious question from theatergoers was “Why?” The answer to that lay in the second biggest question of the day, from a completely different audience: “What took you so long?”

Even hardcore critics of the film changed their tune after experiencing the Paper Mill production. “[It] has a stirring, old-school sincerity that’s hard to resist,” wrote old meanie David Rooney in The Times. “In its call to arms, its refusal to back down to big business, its fight for basic human dignity and its skepticism toward politics, the show also has themes that resonate in our new depression.”

This change of critical heart is due in large part to a reworking of the story’s book by Broadway veteran Harvey Fierstein. Most noticeably, protagonist “Cowboy” Jack Kelly has a new love interest: a young, scrappy female reporter who has replaced the role of the newsies’ journalist champion, Bryan Denton, played by Pill Pullman in the film.

There have been some other major changes in the transition from screen to stage. While 1992 audiences may have found the topic of choice strange, today a story about young, penniless kids trying to form a union hits closer to home.
“There’s a lot more political relevance in Harvey’s adaptation because of events in the world right now.” Alan Menken told The Observer in a telephone interview. He wrote the score for the original film as well as for the stage production. “We honed in on some of the historical perspective in the play. We kept Pulitzer and Teddy Roosevelt (as characters), but we really tried to inject some reality about what the political forces were that led to these newsboys being victimized.”

Newsies, we are now to believe, was the original Occupy Wall Street, though with fewer drum circles and more choreographed dancing.

Newsies: The Musical has gone through a number of changes on its way to Broadway. Six new songs have been added to the show, three of which were created after the Paper Mill production, Mr. Menken said. According to a spokesperson for Disney, the show, which runs through June, has cost $5 million to transfer to Broadway. That’s small potatoes for the juggernaut’s theater arm, and an astonishingly low figure in the era of big-budget musicals like Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. By the time the Julie Taymor left Spider-Man, that production had ballooned to a record-breaking $85 million. The Disney live-action flops of The Little Mermaid and Tarzan cost $15 million and $14 million respectively.

With the show’s short run, it would appear that Disney is being cautious with its latest adaptation, despite the fact that Newsies: The Musical’s small budget and (relatively) bare-bones vehicle has one thing going for it that no other Disney stage production has been able to procure: a genuinely swoon-worthy star.

Jeremy Jordan is one of the hottest commodities in the theater world right now: he made his name playing Jack Kelly at Paper Mill Playhouse, but left to star in the ill-fated Bonnie & Clyde on Broadway. When that show closed after just one month, the 27-year-old Mr. Jordan announced he’d be returning to Newsies for its Broadway debut. Surprisingly, he was greeted not by jeers from scorned fans, but whoops of glee.

“He’s the It Boy this season,” said Laura Motta, cofounder of the Broadway blog TheCraptacular.com. “His career blew up really quickly because he did these two projects back to back. These are two of the most prominent roles of this Broadway season.”

“It doesn’t hurt that he’s easy on the eyes,” Ms. Motta added. The 31-year-old New Yorker has been a Newsies fan since the film’s release, and found herself surprised when she saw the production at Paper Mill. She had been expecting the audience to be filled with people around her own age, the way people will go see a live version of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, joined together in their unabashed love of a film that’s notoriously kitschy.

Instead, Ms. Motta found herself in an audience filled with tweens. “How did these little girls know what this is?” She remembered asking herself, incredulous.
“Someone explained it to me: every Sunday afternoon when they’d play High School Musical on the Disney channel, they would play Newsies right after.” The newsboy flop could even be considered the forefather of the million-dollar HSM franchise, as the screen of cute boys doing back-flips and break-dancing in page boy hats had the same effect on an audience of young women in 1992 as Zac Efron would with more contemporary garb over a decade later. (It must be noted that both films had the same director as well, and Mr. Ortega has a way with making the women shake their hips … he did choreograph Dirty Dancing, after all.)

Not everyone is excited about the changes from screen to stage. Jen Yamato, a West Coast editor of MovieLine.com, is roughly the same age as Ms. Motta, and is equally obsessed with the film. Unlike the Broadway blogger, however, Ms. Yamato isn’t interested in tweaking Newsies: The Musical for a new generation.

“I’m looking forward to seeing it eventually,” she told The Observer in an email. “But I’m a bit worried about the story and character changes they’ve made, from what I’ve read. Newsies the film, to Newsies fans, is pretty much perfect as-is.”

“For my generation it’s the ultimate ‘at that age’ movie, the kind of thing that you love forever because you saw it at just the right time in your life,” she wrote. “I think the changes made between the film and the stage musical reflect a more critical look at Newsies than O.G. fans give it, deliberately or not. Because we grew up with it we love it, warts and all. Younger Newsies fans may also get this, but it’s hard to be sure when the fog of childhood nostalgia is so intrinsically linked to your love of something.”

The desire expressed by Ms. Yamato to claim a piece of so-bad-it’s-good cultural ephemera for her generation is not unusual, especially given the hype(r) fan-kids, who use Tumblr’s Newsies tag to post obsessively about the show and Mr. London.  Original Newsies fans loved the film because of its flaws as much as anything else. The range of celebrity cameos roped into it was as baffling as it was hilarious. Why does Robert Duvall portray Joseph Pulitzer as an Industrial Revolution-era Shylock? Why does Ann-Margret spend her days in a burlesque saloon? Why does Bill Pullman’s war correspondent find hanging out with a bunch of prepubescent boys a meaningful way to spend his time? These are questions original Newsies fans love to pose, but never care to have answered … or changed to make a more coherent, cohesive, and ultimately better story.

Mr. Menken understands those reservations perfectly. “I have two daughters, one is 26 and one is 23. And they were … well, threatening me. ‘We’re going to blank you up, Dad, if you lose this character or change this song!’”

But he defends his stage production. “It really retains the best elements of the movie, and loses the elements that were not so hot,” he said. “Like those turn of the century songs by Madda (Ann-Margret). She’s still there, but she’s got a better song. We’ve improved Newsies, but kept the essence of what the movie really was.”

The Observer, secretly a huge Newsies fan ourself, had to ask about our favorite lines of dialogue: a courtroom scene where the leader of the Brooklyn newsies gangs screams, “I object!”

“On what grounds?” asks the mutton-chopped judge.

“On the grounds of Brooklyn, your honor!”

So will we be hearing Brooklyn pride on Broadway?

“No, unfortunately,” Mr. Menken regretfully informed us. “We cut that part out.”

Cast of 'Newsies' performing on 'The View'

Since we first saw Christian Bale prancing across dusty Manhattan streets belting "Santa Fe," we've held a torch in our heart for the 1992 Disney live-action flop Newsies. We don't even care the Roger Ebert once likened the film to "warmed-over Horatio Alger," since deep down we knew that one day, we'd have the chance to audition for a stage production of the show. (In our fantasy, we weren't Christian Bale/Jack Kelly's love interest, Sarah, because she was a goody-goody. We were always Ann-Margret's brassy saloon singer, Medda Larkson.)

Now our dreams are that much closer to coming true, as the New Jersey production of Newsies at the Paper Mill Theater has just announced the full line-up for its Broadway debut on March 15th.

Even better: the role of Jack Kelly, the brash, con-artist  "Cowboy" (think Sawyer from Lost, except younger, and with a terrible American accent and a love of theatrical dancing) will be reprised by Jeremy Jordan, who had left Newsies in September to star in the ill-fated Bonnie & Clyde. B&C closed last month after a brief run due to poor ticket sales.

Mr. Jordan might also be recognizable to non-theater-going audiences as Dolly Parton's grandson in the new Glee-meets-Sister Act 2 feature film, Joyful Noise.

Jeremy Jordan in Joyful Noise:

Christian Bale as Jack Kelly in the original Newsies:

The cast of Newsies performing on The View back in December:

Osnes and Jordan.

Hang on to your lids, kids. I actually liked the new Broadway musical version of Bonnie and Clyde. Didn’t love it, mind you. But the show, at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, is polished, touching and tuneful, a worthy showcase for a few professional performers in leading roles who are vastly entertaining and amount to nothing short of major discoveries. In a dreary Broadway season of nothing but deadly letdowns, including an unspeakable sonic blast from the pitch-impaired and tonally challenged Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin as well as the dreariest second-rate production of Follies in 40 years, at least there’s something to enjoy in addition to Hugh Jackman.

The two most beloved machine-gun toting gangsters in American history have been brought to life with warm, sexy precision by the glorious singing voices of Laura Osnes and Jeremy Jordan. They can act, too. Forget the mixed reviews comparing them unfavorably with the stars of the 1967 Arthur Penn film. I mean, nobody looks like Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. But could they carry a tune? Ms. Osnes never grows into a movie star translation of hard-luck Bonnie. She’s not cute, vivacious, hard as nails or a model for fashion-trendy costumes. But she has an intrinsically musical instrument that projects beyond the footlights to touch the mezzanine. When she wraps her throat around a creamy ballad like “You Love Who You Love” in an attempt to justify her guilty passion for a hot-blooded bank robber like Clyde Barrow, she has the power to move you to tears. She was a terrific second banana to Sutton Foster in the frisky revival of Anything Goes before she created the role of Bonnie Parker in San Diego, and if the show closes prematurely, I sincerely hope to meet up with her again in a cabaret spotlight in one of New York’s swankier supper clubs. As for the boyishly handsome Mr. Jordan, who dazzled as Tony in the recent West Side Story resuscitation, he can stomp the stage to toothpicks on a rousing number like “Raise a Little Hell” or half-rise naked from a bathtub on a bruising love song with equal aplomb worthy of a closer look (no pun intended). Rising close to their marks and holding her own corner of the stage in every scene is Melissa Van Der Schyff, a knockout belter with a name that regrettably comes close to a fatal detour on the road to stardom; most people have forgotten it already. She plays the sympathetic and pivotal role of Blanche Barrow, the wife of Clyde’s brother Buck and a woman who sacrifices her ideals and self-respect for love, which won Estelle Parsons an Oscar. She stops the show as a kind of operatic Dolly Parton, while the audience begs for more.

Harkening back to the Depression years, director Jeff Calhoun wastes no time getting to the violence. The curtain rises on the movie’s final scene—a bullet-riddled Model T containing the blood-splattered bodies of the country’s most cherished romantic outlaws, gunned down on a Louisiana highway in 1934, rolls out onstage for a good look before the first song. Then the fact-crammed book by Ivan Menchell begins to assemble the reasons why two hormone-busting kids from a dusty, life-wasting butt end of Texas rose from unlucky teenagers to the Most Wanted List in sheriff’s offices throughout the Southwest. Clyde was the tortured son of a sharecropper from Telico, Texas (“That man puts the Hell in Hello!”). Bonnie was an eager, easily manipulated, muffin-headed waitress from Rowena who spent her spare change on movie magazines and helped Clyde break out of jail after he promised to get her to Hollywood. His role model is Al Capone, and she worships Clara Bow. Their story unfolds against a backdrop of wooden slats against which you are educated and fascinated by yellowing newspaper articles, mug shots and arresting Police Gazette daguerreotypes of faces and scenes right out of The Grapes of Wrath—projections bordering on folk art, depicting starving children, breadlines, families in tents and President Roosevelt’s guarantee of a New Deal. Slowly, you begin to understand why Bonnie and Clyde broke the law to ensure a better life they could not afford. By the time they realize they’ve crossed over to the dark side, their love duet, “Too Late to Turn Back Now,” has the resigned element of an adrenalin-pumped future that is anything but rosy. What gives the show its grit, urgency and complexity is the frailty, the flaws and the courage of two tragic lovers—good and evil, brave and foolish—defying the odds to capture the imagination of a nation that wanted to believe a pair of hearts could still beat in the middle of dustbowl economics, prejudice and hopelessness.

Jordan and Osnes.

There are irritating intrusions, including signing autographs after a robbery while the police sirens close in, arguing about whose name should go first in the front-page newspaper stories (Bonnie insists on the same “Bonnie and Clyde” she uses for the title of her long, ballad-shape poem that was published after their deaths, insisting, “Sorry, honey, but nothin’ rhymes with Clyde and Bonnie”). Then there is the score, mediocre at worst, but sometimes a great deal better than that. I’ve never been a fan of Don Black’s corny kindergarten lyrics to James Bond theme songs (“Thunderball,” anyone?) and lugubrious Andrew Lloyd Webber scores, or of composer Frank Wildhorn’s cloying music for boring period pieces (The Scarlet Pimpernel, Jekyll and Hyde, The Civil War), but Mr. Wildhorn does his best, most diversified work here. He has never settled on a uniformly identifiable style, which is O.K., I guess, as long as the style you settle on is not lachrymose musical sludge. This time, his music is surprisingly melodic and versatile. For two rebels with a cause outside the law, trapped victims of the Depression, the romantic, deluded protagonists of Bonnie and Clyde invite an eclectic and restless surge of beats and rhythms and styles, moving through the cycles of doom with reckless fury. The two stars do their darnedest to flesh out both the danger and romance that turned them into folk heroes, and Mr. Wildhorn’s eclectic score gives them room to test their contrasting moods: country, Broadway, blues, and Texas two-step music fit for a county fair, with banjos, rodeo fiddles and, am I wrong, or did I hear a harmonica somewhere in the orchestra pit? Jeff Calhoun sews it together on a Depression canvas broad enough to reflect a whole decade. I’m glad he included actual photos of the real Bonnie and Clyde. She was no Faye Dunaway, and he was plain as a plow mule in a tobacco field.

And so we’ve got ourselves here a down-home musical with guns and whiskey and take-home tunes. You could do worse. Is it great? It’s no My Fair Lady. Will it go down in Broadway history as a milestone? Probably not. But I found it tuneful, lively and highly enjoyable. Just ignore the mixed reviews, and have a rompin’, stompin’ good time.

rreed@observer.com