Seeing Newsies at the Orpheum in Memphis

The Expanded Tweets posts expand on a short post on Twitter (or, a tweet), because 140 characters isn’t always enough to tell the whole story.

Here is the original tweet to start things off:

https://twitter.com/Burnsland/status/676181817142169600

As you can tell from the tweet, we went this past Sunday to the Orpheum Theatre in Memphis to see Newsies. No, there weren’t actually kids there selling newspapers, because nobody reads those things anymore, anyway. Instead, we were there to see the Broadway musical based on the Disney movie of the same name. Laura and I were among the few that actually saw that movie in the theater way back in 1992, and we have always enjoyed it, long before it caught on as a bit of a cult favorite. And no, Christian Bale does not use his Batman voice anywhere in that movie, so don’t get your hopes up if you haven’t seen it yet.

Anyway, we were interested to see how they adapted one of our favorite movies to the stage, and three of the four Riedels went with us. As it turns out, there were several people that we knew there, although we didn’t see most of them there. Instead, we saw about it later on on social media when they posted photos of themselves there. Not to be outdone, I had also posted our photo, which was what was in the tweet above.

So if you are wondering, we really enjoyed it! There were a few new songs along with the songs from the movie to round things out a bit more. A few characters have been changed and combined, so if you really liked the reporter guy or the love interest girl in the movie, you now get two for one! Or I guess that’s really one for two. There were some “adult” words added in, because apparently Broadway plays require that, although I don’t really know why.

But the set design was just fantastic with all of its moving pieces and such. The singing and dancing were good. And the story was still more or less the one we had enjoyed from the movie. Two of the three Burnses (the older two, if you want to know) said that we liked it better than The Lion King, which we had seen back in February. Keep in mind that we aren’t your typical musical theatre people, because we don’t go to those very often, unless it is something that we are really interested in. Such as musicals based on movies that we enjoy.

It did make for a rushed Sunday: leaving church as soon as the service was over, missing the meal with honoring our missionary friends because it was planned after we had already gotten our tickets, eating in the car to make sure we got there on time but still going inside to order our food because I don’t trust drive-thru service, parking at a lot before realizing it cost $20 and then moving the car a block away to a $1 per hour lot, trying to walk against the strong winds like the old mime routine - except that we weren’t acting, getting back to the church building for the evening activities after the show ended. But it was all worth it.

Here are a few more photos from our visit. Click each one to see it larger.

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You are the God who performs miracles; you display your power among the peoples. - Psalm 77:14

About the photos: Each photo was a quick capture with my iPhone 6s. Nothing fancy here. Some were edited with the Snapseed and Hipstamatic iPhone apps. Date: December 13, 2015 Location: Orpheum Theatre, Memphis, Tennessee