playbill vip

We are very excited to present Disney's Newsies to you.  Due to restrictions this is our first show in two years we are able to have a full audience.  Knowing this I selected this production to bring live theater back to large audiences in a big way.  Newsies is packed full of upbeat songs and exhilarating choreography.  At Wilmington High School we have such a talented pool of singers and dancers.  I was drawn to Newsies as the perfect show to highlight the voices, dancers and skill sets of every member in the cast.  

I was also fond of Newsies for the incredible, true story it tells.  A real underdog story proving the power people have and what people can accomplish by working hard, and working together, no matter how old you are.  

The Newsies Strike

Newsies is based on the real-life Newsboys Strike of 1899. The New York newsies – boys and girls who sold newspapers on the street – went up against two newspaper publishers, Joseph Pulitzer of the New York World and William Randolph Hearst of the New York Journal, to fight for the chance to earn a livable wage.

The Spanish-American War made New Yorkers hungry for headlines, and circulation boomed as a result. Once the war ended, people were less inclined to buy newspapers – war was bad for the world, but great for the newspaper business. The strike was the result of the newspaper publishers refusing to lower the newsies’ cost-per-paper back down to the pre-war prices. The newsies were not willing to pay more for their papers to make up for a lack of headlines, so they decided to strike – their goal was to make the newspaper tycoons treat them as legitimate members of the business.

Striking for two weeks, from July 20 to August 2, 1899, the newsies eventually came to a compromise with the publishers: The price would stay the same, but the publishers would buy back any papers that the newsies couldn’t sell. This was a significant moment in history: It was one of the first strikes carried out by children and it ended in compromise. The kids succeeded!