I laugh, but I also cry each time they sing. It's a complicated emotion

This is hilarious! I love it. I was waiting for Jo Ann Harris to walk in and audition. That would have been epic.

LAURA BENANTI!!!

hard to believe it's been a decade since Peak Broadway Podcasting.

First off all, BRILLIANT. Second, could I love Kate more?

How did you guys manage to get all these women and one man to do this?! I'm in shock!

I still think this is genius.

I've watched this 10 times today (so far)!! Love everything about this, especially JP!

WOW! Did you actually get Laura Benanti and Ann Harada to do that? That's insane!

Okay, that's adorable. YAY GIRLS!

Ha! Y'all are hilarious! And woot Jessica Phillips! She looked beautiful!

This is amazing. Nice work dudes.

this is amazing! love it so much!

I want to audition for Patrick's Mom!!

Just saw LNC in Kink Boots she slayed as Lauren!

The thing about Patrick's mom is that she gets overly emotional sometimes. I mean, she registered at an Eponine-level for what by all counts ought to have been the beginning of a really-intense subplot. Maybe Patrick's mom's plot got cut from the movie for time, but they didn't want to pay Alan Menken to redo the song without her. And why would you want to? That opener is killer. It's just that they kind of showed an emotional gun and never fired it. And so like you guys said, Patrick's mom is still wandering around New York. She probably saw the musical and started bawling her eyes out. And all those nice nuns! Again with the dangling plot lines! Can't they at least come back and scold Ann Margaret? By the time they got to A Goofy Movie, they got the nuns down. The nuns enter at the beginning, watching Goofy and Max in the store, and they're a running gag. Here, they hand out apples and coffee. Nuns who hand out apples and coffee. Maybe they were put in there to balance out the implications of Ann Margaret's role. Oh, did anybody catch the exit signs in the movie theater during Ann Margaret's show? Poor Patrick's mom. If you really want to know why Newsies on Broadway failed, though, it's this. Disney emasculated it. First of all, in the Macy's parade, they used this rinky-dink karaoke-sounding track that made "King of New York" sound like a Swap Shop circus. Second, the guys didn't fight each other. Because it's Broadway, they all were like, oh, this is going to make them "pee their pantsies." They really fell a long way with the sanitized lyrics. The whole draw of the original film was that it presented a window of a world that doesn't exist any more, same as the Magic Kingdom did, and most Disney movies. Part of that world- a big part of it, was the raw driving machismo of the male characters. Yes, they were dancing. But they were beating each other up at the same time, and heaving their chests around in a distinctly masculine way. The broadway musical destroyed that, making these once tough thugs sing about losing their shoes and say things that sound downright girlish. Now, the Broadway adaptation ought to be given credit for removing some of the dangling plot lines. For instance, one of the guys in the movie brags about a potential date with the Mayor's daughter. Now, I haven't seen the Broadway play, but I'm guessing the female reporter was a consolidation of Anne Margaret and the movie's activist reporter. And so they got rid of the mayor's daughter because evidently she would have distracted us from the female reporter who shows her leg in that one dance number. Do they bring the nuns back to comment on that? You know, I'll bet the nuns know something about Patrick's mother. Because chances are, if Patrick's mother is as distraught as she is, she's been there before, and she's asked the nuns. I mean, if you were Patrick's mother, wouldn't you ask the nuns? Who wouldn't? Unless Patrick's mother is just really dumb. Because if the nuns are handing out apples and coffee to everybody, they must know something. Youse guys probably already thought of this; I didn't know anybody else cared up until this point. But I think Patrick changed his name to Jack Kelly. If Pixar had gotten involved, they would have consolidated Patrick and Jack Kelly into one person. There would be some plot problems to answer, like, why the heck was Patrick so desperate to get away from his mother that he had to change his name to Jack Kelly. Maybe this is a case where social services might actually be helpful, and in addition to making it a story about why unions are great, it could also make a really good case for government takeover of families, but in an idyllic historical setting. Kind of like the opposite of Brave New World, which paints gov't takeover of families in a more dystopian light in a futuristic setting. The moral of the story here is, DON'T LEAVE PLOTS UNRESOLVED! Because it's really a dirty trick to play on your audience. Thank you. Somebody gets it. Disney is smarter than this. I guess they just didn't think an old franchise with apple-nuns worth spending too much money on. It was a passion project of a few really zealous newsie-files, and Disney gave it the okay, but didn't give it the proper support. I think all of us should come together and gut the script and rewrite it from the ground up just for fun, give it to Disney- no, we can call it Fan Fiction and tell the judge that Disney has caused untold legions of moviegoers accumulated years of pain and suffering for their dangling plot lines - not to mention Song of the South. They have access to the best writers in the industry, and what do they do? They write rugged newsboys who sing about making their enemies peeing their pantsies. Are they schoolgirls at a beetles concert or turn-of-the-century paper pushers? Shoot somebody, darnit. Just- not Patrick's mom. What did she ever do to you? Really.

Kate Baldwin is perfection.

THIS WAS SO AMAZING

How did you guys do this?!? Brava!!

how did you manage to do this, its amazing :)

LINDSAY NICOLE CHAMBERS!

how??

HOW DID YOU GET AHOLD OF ANN HARADA

anyone else notice the glasses their wearing? Look closely...REAL 3D LOL!

Can I play Patrick?

I'm sorry. But was that Laura Benanti?!

*points at Maria Bridget Thompson Durham, née Belfast, Ni 07/Sep/1956*