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February 26-March 4, 2015 • BAY AREA REPORTER • 15
Paperboys pummeled by penurious press by Richard Dodds
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he sun will come out in one day more when you can consider yourself part of the newsies family. With little dabs of lyrics from Annie, Les Miserables, and Oliver!, antecedents for the musical Newsies are evoked, but don’t expect any such potent ear worms from the recent Broadway musical now at the Orpheum Theatre. The songs by Alan Menken and Jack Feldman, with an exception or two, are genially generic, whether they be love ballads or anthemic calls to arms (a song titled “Seize the Day” is heard three times). What you probably will remember is the powerhouse dancing, but even that can lose impact as an army of young dancing men assaults the stage repeatedly in choreography that begins to look very much the same. Despite these shortcomings, Newsies proved surprisingly popular with Broadway audiences in a twoyear run that ended last summer. It is all the more surprising since the source material for the stage musical was the notoriously unsuccessful 1992 Disney movie Newsies – and although I know of no one who is party to the phenomenon, it is said
the movie now has a cult following on home video. What’s on stage is likely too conventional ever to develop a cult following, but in this, its transitory moment of consequence, Newsies can provide two professionally rendered hours of entertainment suitable for young and old, if not for those with a visceral aversion to labor unions. And even they may be able to go with the flow. Harvey Fierstein reworked the film’s screenplay for the new show, and the glory of collective bargaining is invoked with deese-demsand-does urchins battling heartless millionaires over mere pennies. The tale is based on an actual 1899 strike by New York newsboys over reduced compensation from publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, a David versus Goliath tale that the city’s other newspapers gleefully chronicled. Many of the facts have been fudged or conjured by Fierstein, but that’s to be expected when the assignment is to create an entertaining musical comedy. But that freedom is not as fully realized as it could be, a notable case being the wan villains. While a cardboard-deep version of Pulitzer as a ruthless businessman is shown (and heard in a terrible
Deen Van Meer
Dan DeLuca (center) leads a band of newsboys in a strike against powerful publishers in the musical Newsies at the Orpheum Theatre.
money-money-money song), the real dangers to the paperboys’ lives are the authority figures trying to send them to a group home run by an evil warden. But these characters float around the peripheries, and make someone like Mr. Bumble from Oliver! seem like a fully fearsome creation. Fierstein also invents a love interest for Jack Ryan, the newsboys’ charismatic leader who is charis-
matically played by Dan DeLuca. That the girl (an appealing Stephanie Styles) is actually a woman, a newspaper reporter, creates a bit of confusion about just how old our leading-man newsboy is supposed to be. And while it might seem that Tiny Tim strings are being plucked by a crutch-dependent newsboy helpfully nicknamed Crutchie, a real-life Crutchie Morris was part of the 1899 strike. In that role, Zachary
Sayle gets one of the score’s more heartfelt songs, “Letter from the Refuge,” that he delivers while held at a juvenile detention center. The boys find genuine refuge in a music hall run by a buxom entertainer saddled with a weak pastiche of a vaudeville song that finds no extra oomph in Angela Grovey’s performance. The real stars of Newsies are the athletic young performers who dance Christopher Gattelli’s aggressive choreography with boundless vigor. Director Jeff Calhoun’s staging largely involves organizing the movements of set designer Tobin Ost’s towering scaffolds that have a bit of worrisome wobble, at least in their touring incarnation. But Newsies is mostly the kind of polished affair that you would expect from Disney. Polished, in fact, to the point of an edge-free blandness. But the show has energy to spare when dozens of young feet are hammering the boards. It’s just not quite enough to warrant an “Extra, Extra” headline.t Newsies will run through March 15 at the Orpheum Theatre. Tickets are $36-$250. Call (888) 746-1799 or go to shnsf.com.
You’re in the Army now by David Lamble
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ueen and Country, reportedly the last film from legendary British producer-director John Boorman (Deliverance, Hope and Glory), opens in 1952 as a handsome pup, Bill (Callum Turner), gets his notice to report for two years as a conscript (or draftee) in “the King’s Army.” The unstated running gag in this memoir, which ranges in tone from tattered nostalgia to restrained Monty Python/Fawlty Towers-style sendup, is a kick-in-the-pants sendoff to the glory days of empire. But the real attraction for queer audiences in this end-of-agenre romp are the cheeky antics and incendiary irreverence of Bill’s new mate, Percy Hapgood (Garland, Texas-born Caleb Landry Jones, channeling the outlandish, class rage-inspired insolence of a born rebel). Meant to bookend Hope and Glory (1987), Boorman’s much-praised account of a WWII boyhood spent dodging German bombs, Queen and Country saves its best moments for scenes where the flower of British young manhood prepares to serve in some severely unpleasant hot spots. “You’re all about to be posted to Korea, which is no laughing matter,” barks the unit’s stiff-necked unit trainer, Sgt. Major Bradley (David Thewlis). But of course, the results are very funny, as in the scene where Bill and Percy mock Sgt. Bradley’s worshipful feelings for the then-dying monarch, King George VI. “They say he’s ill, the King.” “If that were so, Buckingham Palace would issue a bulletin. It has not, so he is not.”
“Do you have any family, Sgt. Major?” “No.” “You’re married to the Army. That makes the King kind of like your Dad!” “That silly remark will result in a charge of insolence, Sgt. Hapgood.” “He only meant it in the sense that nuns are married to Jesus, sir.” One of the few quibbles I had with this mockumentry of everything bygone generations were taught to hold sacred was that the stakes weren’t a tad higher. Ultimately, Percy risks it all – meaning a term in a very nasty military prison, where unmentionable horrors would be inflicted on his privates – in order to swipe the regimental clock, a doorstop-worthy trophy that one of his sergeants regards as dearer than life itself. Apart from the brief army-camp tent scenes where Bill and Percy coexist in a sadly platonic bliss. the best of Queen and Country emerges from the broad humor when Bill and Percy attempt to instruct their barely literate charges in the fine art of becoming an infantry unit typist. Jones deftly demonstrates what a natural-born fuckup is like when he’s wielding the whiphand over recruits he clearly looks down upon. “Order: o-r-d-e-r. You’ll be typing like girls in no time. What are you flouncing about for, Hennessy?” “Still trying to type like a girl, Sergeant.” “Are you a nancy boy, Hennessy?” “No, Sergeant. But I’ve fucked a lot of boys who are!” If Caleb Landry Jones looks a tad familiar, it’s probably because you’re recalling a third-act mo-
BBC Worldwide North America
Callum Turner as Bill Rohan in a scene from director John Boorman’s Queen and Country.
ment from the Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men where his bike-riding Texas teen renders assistance to the film’s injured serialkiller monster (Javier Bardem). The boy actor removed his shirt in an unforgettable close-up that has doubtlessly been featured in many a private clip-reel. Queen and Country is dedicated to recalling the British version of the
Eisenhower era, a buttoned-down, conformist time when, ironically, Her Majesty’s by-the-book army was one of the few places where a free spirit could cut loose and fly. As director Boorman recalls in chats promoting the film, this was a time for timid souls, right before the riotous 1960s, when all that Bill and Percy’s keepers worshipped would be forever consigned to the dustbin of history.
Those seeking a broader, sillier take on British army life should rent Privates on Parade, a hilarious John Cleese vehicle where the Monty Python star teams up with a dotty-drag-attired Denis Quilley to demonstrate just how many laughs could be had when His Majesty’s Forces entertained the troops in the Communist-occupied Malayan jungles (from ex-Beatle George Harrison’s HandMade Films).t