Last night was magic

I’m a fan girl, which is obvious to anyone who knows me. I have books all the places beside my bed subbing for a nightstand and by my couch subbing for a coffee table…perhaps I should buy more furniture. But last night, one of my childhood dreams came true, I heard Jack Kelly sing about the power of unions.

Summary in brief, Newsies is the best Disney flop of all time. It was my favorite movie and immediately behind that was Dark Crystal  #dontcare. It came out in 1992 (and for those of you doing the math I was about seven) starring Christian Bale or as you know him, Batman. The general story is Batman takes on newspaper barons by organizing the child labor in New York at the turn of the 20^th Century. It is obviously more complex, but at the end of the day it is a feel good story about class war where the underdog wins. The whole thing centers around child labor pre-child labor laws, or most labor laws as we know them, work place injuries and the underclass getting screwed. I am happy to have a screening at my house if anyone doubts the wonder of this movie. The role of women might be the biggest differences between the movie and musical. Essentially, in 1992, the only active women characters were Davey’s sister and Ms. Medda. In the musical, my guess to reflect more diversity not only are there more men of color, it transforms the reporter from Bill Pullman to a girl. We’ve come so far.

I could also talk for a while about the addition of a girl reporter and her relationship to Jack, and essentially the promise of class jumping as a new ending, vs. the movie version where everyone stays in the appropriate class. While there are some flights of fantasy in both the movie and musical, this last one where Jack gets to class jump kind of ruined it for me. Because, I can suspend belief, but no way in hell would the powerful of New York in 1900 give power over to someone who then believes himself their equal and class jumps. They would have rather seen the city burn because the way this works is if we all go back to the place we belong, but I digress. All of this comes from the real life Newsboys Strike of 1899, where I believe a 14 year old boy stop New York by blocking traffic, sounds kind of familiar.

This movie is the first real exposure to the power of collective organizing for a lot of kids (I’m not kidding, I can think of a handful of progressive bloggers, podcasters, etc. who feel the same way, and they are overwhelmingly women—Batman). As babies of the 80s we didn’t get to see the power of unions, only their decline and this from a daughter of two machinists in Ohio where the belief of the good union job is still strong. Notably, this is the first positive representation of unions I can remember receiving from the media, outside of folk songs, which I’m guessing many of my peers weren’t exposed to.

I can’t help but wonder if the resurgence of plays that discuss class hint at something larger. It isn’t just Newsies and Les Miserables that saw a revival; Rent never went out of style. Additionally, Wicked, Chicago, Dirty Dancing (someone explain how this is a stage production), and Annie all have class elements, and those are all coming to Baltimore in the next year.  It was interesting sitting in the Hippodrome, a location that has had some ups and downs. While Baltimore gentrifies there has been a continued push to leave the Hippodrome alone. My friend explained to me that the Hippodrome is the last real theatre left in Baltimore. It is also right off of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, and not the best of neighborhoods. So having paid a significant amount, I’m sitting there in a theatre full of disproportionally white, young people in the middle of a predominantly black city watching a musical about class resistance was pretty surreal. I mean, the boys sitting behind me were in designer jackets singing along with a song called “The World will know.” Don’t get me wrong I love the song too, but even as a kid I knew what that song was about and why it was so clever…PUNS!

Of course, this interest in class is seen in books. For example, We were liars, The Girl who Saved the Kind of Sweden, and The Interestings are bestselling, critically acclaimed books I’ve read in the last year that have strong class commentary. How about movies? Anyone see Snowpiercer or any of the Hunger Games films? There has been a strong push for media that address class clearly. You can obviously read into media and see the class implications, but the production of Les Mis I saw, and the movie, emphasized class more than the stage productions had in the past. I mean the closing scene where Jean ValJean goes to heaven, the barricade is there with all those lost to the cause revolution and poverty. Notably, Hugo strongly pushed the redemptive nature of love; meaning to love another person selflessly is to redeem your soul. It comes across in a lot of his work. The movie asserted revolution for the poor counts as redemptive love. That’s not in the play, and maybe not the novel, but it has been a love time since I read that.

I’m going to conclude with a comment on creators and their agendas. I don’t think Disney meant to revive the image of organized labor in anyway, in fact I think they are banking on the nostalgia of my generation. However, I know JK Rowling was writing about Parliament and the relationship with Blair and Bush in Harry Potter. With that knowledge, I want to know what Suzanne Collins was really writing about in The Hunger Games. I want to know what the agendas are behind this new push for discussion of class within media.