A musical called Newsies, based on the 1899 strike by young newspaper vendors in New York, is reported to be delighting audiences in Broadway theatre previews.
The New York Post reports that there were three standing ovations during one preview.
Newsies was originally a movie, released by Disney in 1992, and the media company is backing the stage version too. It has already taken $8m in advance ticket sales.
Written by Harvey Fierstein with music by Alan Menken, it tells how the newsboys - most of them poor orphans - forced the media moguls of the time, Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, to pay them more for their work.
Fierstein, writing for Huffington Post, notes that "musicals about newspaper publishing are few and far between." (Can anyone think of any?)
He writes: "As I sat re-imagining the story of Newsies... I wondered what would be lost when we eventually lose newspapers.
"I wanted to make at least one cogent argument defending print media to a culture that doesn't seem to care if the daily paper disappears altogether. What could that argument be?"
Eventually, he lighted upon "a newspaper stronghold that demands attention and participation: the political cartoon." Fierstein writes:
"Throughout history the political cartoon has kept the record of our follies and triumphs. They have levelled the mighty and motivated the seemingly powerless...
Art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate.
Here was the argument I could put forth in a family musical about the newsboy strike of 1899.
I turned the hero of Newsies into an untrained artist who chronicles his world with sketches, and those sketches become the rallying cry for political and social change."
If the Post's Michael Riedel is right - and other critics agree with him - then Newsies is likely to walk away with a Tony. And a touring version may end up here in Britain.
Sources: New York Post/New York Daily News/HuffPo