Musicals we love: Newsies

Fight the power … Newsies at the 66th annual Tony awards in 2012. Photograph: Andrew H Walker Photograph: Andrew H Walker

Kenny Ortega's 1992 film dramatising the 1899 newsboy strikes in New York was – how to put this nicely? – not very well received by critics or audiences. It was a rare live-action flop for Walt Disney Studios, which at the time was hoping the film would launch a new era of movie musicals. And by any measure, the formula should have delivered success: choreographer Ortega – highly respected after working on Dirty Dancing and Ferris Bueller's Day Off – was trying his hand at directing for the first time, and composer Alan Menken had just won Oscars for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. Throw in that cute little Christian Bale kid, and audiences should have been lining up, right?

Newsies cost $15m to make, and it didn't even crack $3m at the box office. Everyone involved seemed in a hurry to move along to better projects. Menken won another Oscar with Aladdin, Ortega went on to direct High School Musical, and Bale's career certainly recovered, didn't it? No one seemed to much remember Newsies – no one, apparently, except preteen girls.

It's a mysterious process by which any failed film finds itself a cult success, especially in those pre-internet days, but in this case it was probably a result of some combination of the Disney Channel, Menken's genuinely good and singable melodies, and slumber parties.

Watching on mobile? Click here to see Newsies on Broadway

Flash forward 20 years, and I was walking through Times Square at 5am in the summer of 2011, and an ad blew across my path. It was a scene not out of place in a Disney film – the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, New Jersey, would be staging Newsies for a limited engagement of just under four weeks. One of Walt's bluebirds of happiness might as well have been singing on my shoulder the whole way home, I was so giddy. I bought tickets the moment I could, convinced that the musical would, like the film, be poorly received and disappear back into whatever ether had brought it back into the world.

I needn't have been so worried.

Seeing Newsies at Paper Mill was the first time I realised that my favorite cult musical had other fans, too. Rabid ones, who swarmed the tiny playhouse in New Jersey, drawn by a combination of nostalgia and curiosity. We were rewarded with a project that kept everything good about the film we loved – the songs, the story of the underprivileged underdogs fighting against the 1%, the charming Teddy Roosevelt cameo. Under Harvey Fierstein's guidance, the stage musical had shed or strengthened the film's weakest elements, including shoddily drawn side characters and an even more shoddily concocted romance between 17-year-old strike leader Jack Kelly and a generic love interest. In the stage musical, she's become a young reporter hoping the strike is her ticket to the front page. The film's poorly lit, semi-sunny and washed-out sets are replaced with a Meccano set-like structure that serves as a launching point for the show's physically fantastic and powerful dance routines.

Newsies started its run at Paper Mill a week after Manhattan's Zuccotti Park became home to Occupy Wall Street. The two share a philosophy – broadly defined as fighting the inhumanity of big business – and for a few weeks it was possible to get off the train from New Jersey and go straight to Zuccotti Park to see young people fighting for fairness in the face of a system built on keeping them and many Americans down. By the time the musical moved to Broadway, Zuccotti Park had been cleared. The US union movement has been in tatters in recent decades, but I like to believe that for all the people who've seen Newsies over the last few years, at least a few walk out wanting to continue to fight for fairness.