'NEWSIES: The Heart Behind The Headlines' Launches Free Paramount Theatre Broadway Panel Series

Paramount Theatre is introducing a new Broadway Panel Series this season meant to spur open dialogue between Paramount's theater artists, education staff, outside experts and audience members.

Newsies: The Heart Behind the Headlines launches Paramount's new panel series on Saturday, September 28, from 5:30 pm. to 6:30 p.m., in the new JoAnne McKee Studio Theatre, Paramount School of the Arts, 20 S. Stolp Ave., in downtown Aurora.

Paramount's Broadway Panel Series events are free, but reservations are recommended as space is limited. RSVP to school@paramountarts.com or call (630) 896-6810.

Paramount's first panel syncs with the theater's 2019-20 Broadway Series opener, Disney's Newsies, the popular family musical inspired by the real-life Newsboys Strike of 1899 in New York City. At Newsies: The Heart Behind the Headlines, audience members, Paramount artists and distinguished guest panelists will delve deeper into the history, themes and continued resonance of Newsies and its true story of scrappy, turn-of-the-century newsboys hawking a tycoon's newspaper, while barely making enough to survive.

Paramount's Newsies panel includes Jim Corti, Paramount Theatre Artistic Director and director of Newsies; Francesca Morgan, a history professor at Northeastern Illinois University and expert on streetcorner newsboys in American cities and other forms of child labor; and Susan Campbell Bartoletti, author of Kids on Strike, a book about the newsboy strike of 1899.

The new Broadway Panel Series is programmed by Andrea Pikscher, Education and Community Engagement Coordinator, Paramount Theatre. For more information on Paramount's education and community programming, including the full slate of performing arts classes now on offer for newborns to adults at the new Paramount School of the Arts, visit ParamountSchool.com or call (630) 896-6810.

Newsboys go on strike to show a greedy publishing tycoon they're not going to be pushed into the gutter in Disney's Newsies, playing now through October 20, 2019 at Paramount Theatre, 23 E. Galena Blvd. in Aurora, Illinois. Jim Corti directs the fleet-footed family musical inspired by the real-life Newsboys Strike of 1899 in New York City.

Paramount's fall opener Newsies is now playing to audience and critical acclaim through October 20. For tickets and information, visit ParamountAurora.com, call (630) 896-6666, or stop by the Paramount Theatre box office, 23 E. Galena Blvd. in downtown Aurora, Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.