Newsies

In this electric musical, 1900’s New York City newsboy Jack befriends two newcomers to his trade, brothers David and Les. When publisher Pulitzer sets new rules that make it harder for the young newspaper salesmen to make a buck, Jack leads the boys on strike. Their tenacity and fortitude demonstrate the impact unions can have and what happens when younger generations band together to fight for their seat at the table.

This show is full of heart wrenching drama and big rousing musical numbers so the challenge with this design came with ensuring there would be enough space for all that action on the relatively small stage. To achieve this, the cast made use of two large rolling stair units which were choreographed into dance numbers and reconfigured between scenes to represent various locations. I made use of existing architectural elements of the theater to achieve a bare-bones, industrial aesthetic. In the theater, a catwalk is used for storage and to hang overhead lighting fixtures, in the world of the Newsies, that very same catwalk becomes a stretch of scaffolding to which characters can escape the busy streets of NYC and steal away for an intimate ballad. Other scenes are represented downstage by bringing on deli tables and chairs, a publishing mogul’s office desk, or a seat in a theater box from which a critic writes a review.