The  West Geauga Theater Department proudly produced and performed the musical Newsies! 

Newsies is a show inspired by the real-life newspaper strike of 1899 in New York City. For those unfamiliar with the term, a “newsie” is someone who works in the news industry, especially a reporter.

 The musical follows newsie Jack Kelly (played by Berkeley Makuch) and his aspirations of life as an artist away from New York. To make money, he and other newsies sell newspapers for the New York World. In order to make more money, the owner of the newspaper company, Joseph Pulitzer (played by Patrick Hensel) raises the newspaper price without giving the newsies a raise. The newsies take action with a little help from Katherine Plumber, (played by Julianne Speyer) a woman who wants to be a journalist. Together, they take on the man in the amazing musical Newsies. 

The entire cast has worked incredibly hard during this amazing show ! Junior Quinn Misterka, the stage manager for the show, often came in at 6:30 in the morning to make sure everything would be correct for the show. 

Like any dramatic production, a lot went into it, with a tech crew, a painting crew (that included yours truly), a building crew for the actual setup for the show, and the cast! They put countless hours into perfecting the numbers you saw as they performed the show. 

Not only has everyone in the cast and crew put in work, but the production had multiple directors. The co-directors included high school vocal music teacher, Ms. Rachel Imhoff and Ms. Emma Figge. Student director, junior Taylor Atwara livened the mood of rehearsal when times got tough and when morale was low. Both Figge and Atwara were involved in other theater performances, but still found time to come in and assist with the West G. production.