Newsies: The Broadway Musical is an excellent screen-to-stage-screen adaptation of the 1992 movie of the same name directed by Kenny Ortega. From a technical perspective, it’s the perfect adaptation; the camera work is excellent. They found an excellent way to capture the majority of the stage and keep the viewer’s attention on the action without using excessive closeups (like Hamilton). It’s hard to comment on the directing because I’d assume there’s nothing special; it just felt like there were a few cameras at a regular performance of the show.

Now for the story, characters (and acting) and other stuff: The story is almost identical to the original movie with a few changes that I’ll address in a few sentences from now. The casting is excellent; they use a combination of the original Broadway cast and the US national tour cast. I can’t comment anymore because I’ve never seen the show with either the full original cast or the US touring cast perform in person.

In my opinion on the show itself, the music is excellent, but that makes sense because it uses most of the movie’s original music and a few new songs added for the play and by Allen Menken. As I alluded to in the last paragraph, the acting is good, and like the movie, there’s a lot of outstanding dancing. I’m not too fond of the character change of Kathrine, a hybrid character of a gender-bend of the journalist who decides to cover the strike and Jack’s love interest. I’m not that I’m against gender-bending, but in this case, it’s more about the implementation and how the character’s hybridization affects the story. But one addition I liked was Crutchie’s song, which gave more dimension to the character. The music itself was great, but another peeve of mine about this production is that they changed the sequence of some of the songs compared to the original movie.

Overall, I’d give Newsies: The Broadway Musical great/perfect.

I forgot to mention that it paced much better than the movie (at least the beginning of the film).