Newsies, which began life as a Disney movie before morphing into a brand-new stage musical at Paper Mill Playhouse, was inspired by a real-life event: the strike of newsboys against Joseph Pulitzer and other publishers who tried to take more than their fair share of the young workers’ earnings.

Jack Kelly 1: Jack is speaking to the ‘scabs’—other newsboys who have been paid extra by the newspaper to cross the strike lines and keep working.

His best friend Crutchie, an entrepreneurial newsie who uses a crutch, is asleep on the rooftop and asks for help climbing down to the streets. Instead, Jack shares his view of the city, and his dream for a better life (Santa Fe – Prologue).

The Newsboys Strike of 1899 began on July 20 in New York City. The “newsies” who hocked newspapers for the New York Journal and the New York World went on strike, demanding that the wholesale price increase, from 50 cents per one hundreds newspapers to 60 cents per one hundred newspapers, be rolled back.

One of the most important themes in Newsies is that children can and do indeed have power. To give some historical context Newsies is set in a time when child labor laws were nonexistent. Never the less the newsies “seized the day” and proved that they are a force to be reckoned with and respected….

Universal Studios

Tim Campbell

Alan Menken

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The show was nominated for 8 Tony Awards- including Best Musical. The show won the Tony for Best Choreography (Christopher Gattelli) and Best Original Score (Alan Menken and Jack Feldman).

Character Profile: Crutchie (Musical Version) Age: Unsure. However, given that he’s Jack’s best friend, he’s probably fairly close in age to him- 15 to 18. Flirts to sell papers. During Carrying the Banner, he sings that selling “takes a smile that spreads like butter, the kind that turns a lady’s head”.

Crutchy Morris

May be cast male or female. Spot Conlon: Male or Female, Age 17-20, The proud leader of the Brooklyn newsies, boasts an intimidating reputation and a short singing solo in “Brooklyn’s Here.”

Jack Kelly’s dream is to go to Santa Fe to start a new life. But with the help of David, and all of the newsies, he realizes that he already has a family right in New York City. Sometimes family isn’t always people you’re related to. Sometimes family is a group of newsies.

(Francis Sullivan) Kelly

Newsies is based on the Newsboys Strike of 1899. Everything that happened in the strike is included in the movie and the musical. Finally, in the movie and musical, Theodore Roosevelt helped Jack and the Newsies with the strike against Pulitzer and Hearst.

After the strike, Kid Blink got a job as a cart driver and later as a saloon keeper. He may have also worked as the right-hand man to New York mobster Chuck Connors. He died in July 1913 at the age of 32 of tuberculosis.

Newsboys not only had to pay more for the newspapers they sold but they were not refunded for unsold papers. At the time newsboys were earning on average 26 cents a day. The articles paint a vivid picture of the challenges the newsboys faced and bring to life many of their colorful leaders.

Newsies bought their papers at the wholesale price of fifty cents per hundred until 1899, when the New York World and New York Journal raised the price to sixty cents per hundred. The newsboys went on strike, but it wasn’t entirely successful.

The paperboy has largely disappeared. Newspapers are delivered by adults who throw the papers out of the windows of their vehicles. No one even tries to get the newspaper next to the door with the name of the paper right side up.

Childen that are 11 to 18 work no more than 12 hours. Ages 9-11 work no more than 8 hours.

A newspaper hawker, newsboy or newsie is a street vendor of newspapers without a fixed newsstand. Related jobs included paperboy, delivering newspapers to subscribers, and news butcher, selling papers on trains.

breaker boy. young boys, usually between the ages of 8 and 12 years old, employed in the breaking of mined coal into relatively uniform sized pieces by hand and separating out impurities such as rock, slate, sulfur, clay and soil.

Casting

• Jack Kelly. The charismatic leader of the Manhattan newsies, is an oprhaned dreamer and artist who yearns to get out of the crowded streets of New York and make a better life for himself out West.
• Crutchie.
• Davey.
• Les.
• Newsies.
• Scabs.
• Spot Conlon.
• Katherine Plumber.

So the sweatshop workers are on strike, the Newsies get the paper’s costs to go back down, and Jack reunites with Sarah and David, and all ends happily ever after as they go dancing into the sunset (metaphorically).

Even though in the original movie there was a female character, she was not a newsie. In the original Broadway production, they dressed the female ensemble as boy newsies. Some immigrant families only had girls and, like boys in the other families, they had to help bring income to the house.

Kid Blink