Musical: Newsies

At midnight tonight, I signed on to watch Newsies, a musical based on the true story of a newspaper strike, again with Thumbs Up Theatre Toronto. Available for free on Daily Motion, which is nice!

You can actually watch it anytime - midnight (my time) was just when the group was meeting. Well, some of them - at most, about 10 out of the 78 who'd signed up. Mind you, one person complained that she hadn't been able to get the Zoom link to work. (She should have read the site more carefully - the host explained that if clicking it didn't work, you should copy the address into the address bar. Worked for me - clicking didn't.) Mind you, with not even the host attending, I suspect that wasn't the only reason so few turned up to the chat. Personally, I was ignored so completely that it felt as though I was on mute - couldn't get a word in edgeways, finally did go on mute, turned off my video, and disengaged. Naturally, I didn't bother chatting with them afterwards.

The show itself - is fantastic. The person who took it upon herself to do most of the talking during that chat reminded us that we'd actually heard about this show from Tim, from Broadway Up Close! And although she got his surname wrong, she was right about that, as I duly remembered. He'd said that this had never made it to the UK - he explained how the real-life "newsies" - the newspaper sellers - were children, and they can't use children in stage productions - not large numbers of them, at least. So what they did, in North America, was to source lots of short actors who could sing and dance. According to him, it never made it to the UK because they couldn't find enough of those. Well, that was his story..

Whatever. The writing in this is terrific, the songs are catchy, the dancing is top-notch, the story is uplifting, the leads are cute, there's a love story - what more could you want? It's a great shame it never did make it to the UK. I loved it - it's ages since I saw a musical, and this is an excellent one. Highly recommended!

Except for one thing. Daily Motion, unfortunately, peppers it with ads - more than I've ever seen. I timed them - literally every 5 minutes, we were subjected to the same blasted ad (shown twice, back-to-back) for Disneyworld Paris. Popped up right in the middle of songs, or of dialogue. If anything were guaranteed to make me hate the place.. It was unbearable. I've never before needed an adblocker, but after five runs of this, I'd had enough, and installed Total Adblock. Free - and it works like a dream! I watched the rest in blissful, ad-free peace. Huh. Also recommended.

And tomorrow, it's back to another quiz from Cultureseekers - this one on British quotes. Another Meetup with no chatting for me, but can't be helped. I doubt I'll get many answers right, but the quotes should be interesting.