Southwest students seize the day

After more than five decades of yearly musicals, Green Bay’s Southwest High School is finally checking Newsies off its to-do list as it prepares to open a two-weekend run of the show.

“This is our 56th annual show at Southwest,” Director Brandon Rockstroh said. “I think the kids who were in the first ever musical here are now 74 years old, which is pretty amazing. The show Newsies is a classic that a lot of schools do and we’ve never done it. It’s always been on our wishlist to do, we just wanted to find the right year to do it.”

With a flourishing theater program and heavy interest from all the necessary groups, Rockstroh said the right year had finally come.

“This year, we knew we’d have a lot of interest from male students and we’d have a very heavy dance cast, which informed our decision to do Newsies,” he said. “And we decided to play half of the newsies as female, which is historically accurate — it’s not how some schools do it, though — and so our girls were still interested in doing the show as well.”

Interest in participating in Newsies was high, with more than 100 kids coming out to be a part of all aspects of the production.

“[The musical] is the largest club or activity in our school,” Rockstroh said. “This year’s show involves almost 150 kids in the cast, crew, pit orchestra and our student leadership groups. And we get kids from all different backgrounds — some prefer to dance, some are actors or they’re instrumentalists or they want to be on one of the crews. We try to take advantage of everyone’s talents and their availability to create a cohesive group that has a unified product in the end.”

Putting on such a large production and involving so many students, though, doesn’t come without its own challenges.

“This show specifically was a challenge because some of the characters dance a ton and some dance barely at all and so trying to find a way for everyone to feel buy-in in the show, regardless of what role they had, was an interesting aspect,” Rockstroh said. “We also decided to involve middle schoolers, which is only the second time in the last 15 years that we’ve done that. Our feeder middle school is Lombardi Middle School, so we have 12 of those students involved in this production which added to the numbers and hopefully all those kids are looking forward to staying in our shows.”

Those planning on attending the show can expect to feel moved by the power of the show, which is enhanced by the volume of students involved.

“It’s kind of this David and Goliath story and there’s this moment in the end where the small little newsies win,” Rockstroh said. “They get what they’ve been hoping for and they get representation from the rich people and there’s a song they do in the second act, it’s called ‘Once and For All,’ and they’re all coming together and they all hold up a newspaper — all 80 in the cast at once — and it’s just this powerful goosebumps moment for the entire audience.”

But it’s not just goosebumps that Rockstroh hopes audiences walk away with.
“I hope they walk away feeling the message of the show…” Rockstroh said.

“That message that we can all come together despite our differences. There’s kids from every background coming together to perform a unified message and it kind of symbolizes the message of the show. I hope people walk away feeling that feeling of unity.”

“We live in very divisive times in our country, sadly, and this show is all about unity,” Rockstroh said. “It’s about coming together for a united cause and finding the humanity in all of it. I really like that that’s the message on stage and also the message that I’m hoping the students embody off the stage as well.”

A message of unity isn’t the only thing Rockstroh hopes his students take away from this year’s musical, though.

“I think my favorite part of doing the musical each year is seeing students find their own sense of identity,” Rockstroh said. “For some people, that’s finding their voice, growing in confidence, meeting more friends, finding a place in this school to plug in or just giving them more pride when they walk in these doors every morning because they’re involved in such a successful and unifying club in our school.”

Rockstroh said he hopes the students involved in this year’s production walk away not only with a better understanding of who they are, but also more confidence in their ability to stand up for what they believe in.

“Integrity matters and sticking to your guns and what you believe in, fighting for what you believe in and standing up for what you believe to be right — those are important things for young people to learn,” Rockstroh said.

“Oftentimes, the world tries to silence those [qualities] in young people and we want to be advocates for them to use their own voice. This show is really emblematic of an actual newsies strike that happened right around the turn of the century and here we are 125 years later, but hopefully the students realize that as they go throughout their own lives, there are going to be times when they need to speak up for what they believe in and I want them to feel empowered to do so.”

Tickets for Southwest’s production of Newsies are available at trojanmusical.com.

Performances will take place Dec. 6, 7, 12, 13 and 14 at 7 p.m.