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.'"

Philip Seymour Hoffman and Andrew Garfield, both Tony nominees for 'Death of a Salesman.' (Getty Images)

The Tony nominations were released this morning, and the musical film adaptation Once leads the field with 11 nominations; it's nominated for Best Musical alongside Newsies, Nice Work If You Can Get It, and Leap of Faith. The nominees for Best Play include Clybourne Park (a Pultizer-winning play), Other Desert Cities, Peter and the Starcatcher, and Venus in Fur. Among the races to watch are Best Performance by an Actor in a Play--wherein Philip Seymour Hoffman, James Earl Jones, Frank Langella, John Lithgow, and James Corden (of the hit One Man, Two Guvnors) square off--and Best Costume Design of a Musical--where Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark received one of its two nominations, for the late costumer Eiko Ishioka. Hugh Jackman and Actors' Equity are to receive special awards.

Jordan, center, leads the Newsboy Strike. (Deen van Meer)

From their vast catalog of whimsical mermaids, flying nannies, royal lions, talking cars, sleeping beauties and singing teapots, the folks at Disney have plucked another gang of family-friendly folk heroes and landed them on Broadway, and if the performance I saw of Newsies the Musical is any evidence, the Disney marketing geniuses will make it a solid success. There wasn’t one available seat, not even in the men’s room, and the Nederlander Theatre was packed like a jar of maraschino cherries with school groups, parents, teachers and ticket buyers young and old, desperate for good old-fashioned entertainment. They left with sore throats and callouses on their hands from screaming so loud and applauding so long. They got their money’s worth, and so will you.

This is all the more surprising since the lively new musical with more bounce to the ounce about the 1899 newsboy strike that humbled Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst is based on real tabloid history (never a show business lure—just ask Bonnie and Clyde) as well as a flop 1992 movie with Christian Bale, Ann-Margret and Robert Duvall. Those boys at Disney really know how to recycle. They drafted Harvey Fierstein to polish the book, Alan Menken and Jack Feldman to pen a dozen or so songs (not counting reprises), Christopher Gattelli to map out the choreography that never stops sailing, stomping and strutting, and Jeff Calhoun to direct a cast that looks (and sounds) like the entire population of Hoboken, N.J. They all do a splendid job of bringing to life a period New York as grim as city slums and graky as skin-blackening rub-off newspaper ink. It was an ugly time, near the turn of the century, of gaseous trolleys, polluted air, nonexistent laws protecting child labor, oppression, poverty and rampant crime. The “newsies” were typical of the children who toiled in factories, sweatshops and slaughterhouses of the day—waifs, ragamuffins and street urchins, mostly orphans and homeless immigrants, who lived in everything from cheap lodging houses with one toilet to whiskey barrels. They dodged the cops, the muggers and the bullies from Brooklyn, ever in danger of being sent to a jail for kids out of the pages of Charles Dickens. The plot, such as it is, hinges on the strike that was perceived as a threat to New York’s shaky economic troubles (or, in Joseph Pulitzer’s interpretation, as a menace to his own self-serving economic profits). At the root of the headlines was the greed and apathy of the moguls who charged the newsies six cents for each 10-cent paper and refused to take back unsold copies, then jacked up the costs, forcing them to sell more papers to make a miniscule profit. The narrow conflict involves the ways the disenfranchised newsies turned the tables on management by forming their own union and going on strike (like the garment workers in The Pajama Game). Their leader was a tough, uncrackable nut named Jack Kelly (played by the ferociously exuberant Jeremy Jordan, the multitalented star of the recent, underrated Bonnie and Clyde). Historical documents differ on the success of the newsboy strike, but there’s no doubt that it cut deeply into the circulation and advertising dollars of both the World (which later became the World-Telegram) and the Journal (which morphed into the Journal-American) and brought Pulitzer, Hearst and even New York’s governor, Theodore Roosevelt, to the front lines, making concessions they never dreamed possible. The show takes numerous liberties. Roosevelt was never involved in the disputes, Pulitzer was out of town and the romance between Jack Kelly and Pulitzer’s daughter—a reporter for the New York Sun who exposes her own father’s sins, disgraces him by falling in love with a lowly newsie and ends up, when the strike is over, launching Jack’s respectable new career as a newspaper illustrator and artist—is pure invention. When a scruffy band of kids with holes in their socks and air in their pockets take on the most powerful newspaper moguls in journalism to improve their meager income by a few pennies and gain respect for their rights in life, it doesn’t diminish the solid entertainment value of the show one bit. In fact, you find yourself cheering. Who cares about facts when you’re having so much fun?

Played out against the ladders, stairs and fire escapes of Lower East Side scaffolding, the show never stops moving, not even when it pauses for a corny line like “Don’t ever say I didn’t give you nothin’—and before you think water is nothin’, just ask a fish in the desert.” Mr. Fierstein’s dialogue is not always convincing and the thrust of his book gives you the strike details, but you don’t learn much about the kids who are doing the striking. Newsies named Crutchie, Race, Romeo and Mush were real people who vanished when the strike faded into history, but they register less as members of a union than as members of a chorus. The big nonstop thrills come from the production numbers themselves. The newsies dance with brooms and duel with spoons and tap in unison for an audience that goes mad with joy. (They could all replace the cast of Anything Goes tomorrow.) Much applause is lavished on the choreography by Christopher Gattelli (South Pacific). It’s so dynamic that I guess it doesn’t matter if it is somewhat less than original. One undeniably happy musical moment arrives when the newsies dance on their discarded newspapers, split them in half, then dance on the strips of paper with both feet. Never mind that in 1950, Gene Kelly did the same thing in the MGM musical Summer Stock. To the kids in the audience who never heard of Gene Kelly, it’s still enthralling. The dancers are so young and appealing and exploding with libidinous vitality that I was exhilarated even by things I’ve seen before. They walk on their hands. They do double back flips. The energy is overwhelming.

The singing and dancing chorus is the real focus here, but the actors in lead speaking roles are very good, too. This is my fourth exposure to the dynamic Jeremy Jordan after he starred in West Side Story and Bonnie and Clyde and played Dolly Parton’s son in the rocking movie musical Joyful Noise. He just gets better every time. As the newsie with leadership power who daydreams of escaping his hardscrabble past for the wide-open spaces in a wistful ballad called “Santa Fe,” then urges his followers to “Seize the Day” (“Minute by minute, that’s the way to win it”), he acts with sincerity, sings with exuberance and passion, and does splits in mid-air. Kara Lindsay, as the pretty girl reporter looking for a scoop that will get her out of the society pages and fluffy features on flower shows, is perfect and sings like a dream. Capathia Jenkins is a jolly burlesque queen with a robust musical voice as Medda Larkin, the role Ann-Margret played in the film, and John Dossett as an almost fictitious Joseph Pulitzer could be the twin brother of John Slattery, the silver-haired fox on Mad Men. Cheers to them all. The athletic zest of Newsies the Musical sends you away exhausted, but happy.

rreed@observer.com

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.”

'Evita' star Ricky Martin (Getty Images)

Newsies (Nederlander Theatre, March 29)

The next crop of child actors on par with the Billy Elliott kiddos or whoever’s riding the War Horse may be the early-edition-toting stars manqué of the season’s first movie adaptation. (They’ll be helped along by a Harvey Fierstein book and the direction of Jeff Calhoun, fresh off Bonnie and Clyde.) We’re not familiar with the source material—there’s one Christian Bale movie we see as having musical potential, and that’s a Huey Lewis-laden American Psycho spectacular—but Newsies has earned a formidable cult following over the years, and has the potential to break the kind of dancing kiddies that attract Tony attention and keep Professional Children’s School in business!

Gore Vidal’s The Best Man (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, April 1)

America’s most surprisingly-still-alive writer speaks to the present political milieu with a play first performed in 1960, then revived in a well-regarded 2000 production. (Is there some rule that we’re supposed to care about political drama only during election years, when we’re most exhausted by it?) This play tells the story of a presidential nominating convention and the intrigues therein; the cast is to feature a waxwork gallery of legends including Candice Bergen, James Earl Jones, Angela Lansbury—and Donna Hanover, who knows a thing or two about political intrigues.

End of the Rainbow (Belasco Theatre, April 2)

Between the Michelle Williams blockbuster, Smash, and the stacks upon stacks of books, we’ve allowed Marilyn Monroe her moment in the sun—now it’s time to recognize the 20th century’s true tragic diva. Yes, we’re referring to Judy Garland (for the kids: she was kind of like a rough draft of Britney Spears, but with talent). The Garland tale is reprised in End of the Rainbow, a play with occasional music starring the British veteran Tracie Bennett. Sight unseen, we’re not willing to declare Ms. Bennett the “world’s greatest entertainer”—but we’re looking forward to having ourselves a merry little night at the theater!

Evita (Marquis Theatre, April 5)

Don’t cry for Elena Roger, who reversed the notion that Eva Perón must necessarily be portrayed by someone who’s already a big star. Ms. Roger, herself Argentine by way of London’s West End, is to take over Patti LuPone’s tight bun in the new show about the flashy first lady who wins the hearts and minds of her husband’s constituents on the way to consolidating her own power—has anyone sent a comp ticket to Cristina Kirchner? More established stars are to include Michael Cerveris, of Assassins, as Juan Perón, and Ricky Martin, of “She Bangs,” as Che Guevara.

Magic/Bird (Longacre Theatre, April 11)

Bounding down the court comes this year’s Broadway show for heterosexual males—it’s all about sports, and it’s only 90 minutes long. Magic/Bird is put on by the production team behind the surprise hit Lombardi, who may have been the first people to realize that ESPN Classics viewers also have the disposable income, and the inclination, to go to the theater. Telling as it does the story of the basketball battle between the Lakers’ Magic Johnson and the Celtics’ Larry Bird, it reprises the classic theatrical theme of rivalry—though this isn’t a musical, we practically expect either Mr. Johnson’s or Mr. Bird’s character to burst out in “I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”

Clybourne Park (Walter Kerr Theatre, April 11)

Last year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama nearly fell apart before its transfer to Broadway; producer Scott Rudin pulled his support after playwright Bruce Norris reportedly declined to perform in Mr. Rudin’s television adaptation of The Corrections. Thankfully, theater owner Jordan Roth came to the rescue. Mr. Norris’s play about a big house packed with history will be seen in a big house packed with—well, for all the public outcry, straight plays tend to draw a discerning audience. Either way, Clybourne Park picks up the story of the home in A Raisin in the Sun and turns it into a modern-day parable of race in Chicago.

Ghost (Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, April 23)

Another West End transfer—like End of the Rainbow and Evita; can’t we grow our own hits anymore?—adapts the tale of a murder victim, his lonely beloved, and the psychic who brings them together in an evening of ghostly possession and pottery creation. The cast of relative unknowns will be singing music by, among others, former Eurythmic Dave Stewart and lyrics by Oscar-nominated Ghost screenwriter (remember the movie, with Patrick Swayze?) Bruce Joel Rubin. Fun fact: running concurrently with Sister Act, this production features the second Broadway character originated by Whoopi Goldberg, while the star herself warms cushions at The View.

Nice Work if You Can Get It (Imperial Theatre, April 24)

Forget Matthew Broderick’s tragicomedy of a Super Bowl ad! In his new role on Broadway, Mr. Broderick’s every day shall be a “day off”—he portrays a wealthy gadabout who encounters a stunning bootlegger (Kelli O’Hara) during the Jazz Age. (Mr. Broderick in a period piece? One that’s not about Ferris Bueller? Okay!) Ms. O’Hara is the real reason to see this Gershwin brothers show—the long-rising stage ingénue, most recently seen as Nellie in South Pacific, is the sort of well-liked, not-yet-iconic blonde belter who would actually get cast in the fake musical on Smash.

The Columnist (Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, April 25)

Ink-stained wretches like ourselves can’t resist a Broadway dramatization of the newspaper biz, but the new play by Proof Pulitzer-winner David Auburn will appeal even to those who don’t stick press badges in their fedorae. David Alsop, the titular columnist, was a power broker in Washington from the FDR era into that of JFK—all the while keeping his homosexuality concealed. Camelot? Clandestine homosexuality? So many dog-whistles for us even before we knew that the lead actor is John Lithgow, whose appetite for this sort of scenery may never be whetted.

Don’t Dress for Dinner (American Airlines Theatre, April 26)

If the sequel to Marc Camoletti’s surprise hit Boeing-Boeing recreates the writer’s earlier success on Broadway, it will be without the help of star Mark Rylance or a trendily retro flight-attendant aesthetic. This time, little-tested stars like Adam James, Urinetown’s Spencer Kayden, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses’s Ben Daniels read the now-deceased French farce master’s words. There may indeed be hit potential here—this, too, was a smash on the West End, playing for years, and Roundabout Theatre, which has put on a series of pitch-dark shows this season, is likely looking forward to a bit of levity.

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:

Newsies–a (financial) bomb of a film the dealt with the sobering topic of 1922 youth-led Newsboy Strike by getting Christian Bale and Bill Pullman to prance around with half the cast of Nickelodeon's Roundhouse–can now be enjoyed two decades later in live theater form thanks to Disney not learning its lesson the first time.

According to lead actor Jeremy Jordan:

"Disney has invested a lot of money in this, and a lot of work has gone into this,” he said. "I think the audience is in for a lot of intense music, intense dancing and an exciting story. It’s an incredibly inspiring story, incredibly dramatic, but also fun and energetic."

Of course, Disney put a lot of money into Newsies twenty years ago with a budget of $15 million, and only made 1/5th of their investment back. Maybe the ace up Disney's sleeve for the New Jersey production is Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book for the show! Naturally. Why not Harvey Fierstein? That would just be weird. He won't be in it though. Boo!

The fact that Disney is trying to take away some of the "bad idea" thunder from Julie Taymor in no way dampens our enthusiasm for the show, though. As long as we're allowed to sing along quietly in our seats during such classics as "King of New York" and "Carrying the Banner," we wouldn't miss this for the world.