Last weekend we saw Disney’s Newsies at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre which is just a stones throw from Wembley Stadium. The show promised to be an immersive experience and it certainly was that and was much more of a spectacle than I expected knowing the plot.
If you’re not familiar with the show or the Disney movie starring Christian Bale (when he was so much younger) that it is based on, the show is set in 1899 in New York. It revolves around a group of paper boys who are charged a 10c price increase for a batch of newspapers that they sell each day and decide to go on strike and unionise over it.
It doesn’t sound like this should be the plot of a movie or a stage show, but you have to remember that back in those days this was a lot of money, especially if you were one of the kids who more often than not didn’t have families and were fighting over scraps to stay alive. And yes, this is a true story as they rebelled against the newspaper The World.
The venue is set to be like the streets of New York and as you walk in you’ll see laundry hung up and hammocks under the seating. There are cityscapes all over the walls of the theatre and within a few minutes you have performers coming down zip wires over the raked seating.
The show has some winning numbers including the popular Seize the Day and The World Will Know that you’ll probably be singing for a few days after the show is done, and the performances as top notch as you’d expect from an official Disney production.
Playing to three sides, the staging and the cast did a great job to always make you feel you were in the thick of the action. The choreography was fantastic and inventive with stand out moments including when the cast start tap dancing on tables and twirling from lights hanging down from the ceiling. There’s also a decent amount of action with fight choreography and lots of humour.
Conclusion
I’m not sure if the show has more of a following than I was aware of going in, but the audience were electric for the show and there were multiple show stopping rounds of applause and a standing ovation at the end.
