Troubadour Theatre | ★★★★✩

If union leader Mick Lynch is looking for a way to boost the morale of his strikers then he could do worse than take them to one of London’s newest venues.

Inside this cavernous and, on the outside at least, somewhat soulless edifice nestling among other glitzier new-builds near Wembley’s Stadium and Arena, can be found the bare brick and wrought-iron fire escapes of 19th-century New York.

This is the setting (design Morgan Large) of this musicalised version of a real-life dispute between press baron Joseph Pulitzer (yes, of the prize fame) and the street urchins who sold his papers.

Though homeless these flat-capped child “newsies” who dress like extras in Peaky Blinders had to pay the publishers for their stock of newspapers before selling them.

The owners didn’t even buy back their own unsold product. So when Pulitzer put up his prices — not to his readers but the newsies — these child workers got both angry and organised.

Michael Ahomka-Lindsay as Jack Kelly in Disney-s NEWSIES, credit Johan Persson (2)

Michael Ahomka-Lindsay in Newsies (Johan Persson)

First seen as the much forgotten film of 1992 starring a youthful Christian Bale and then as the 2012 Broadway adaptation, the music is provided by the literally incomparable (because he has won more Oscars than any living person) Alan Menken, and lyricist Jack Feldman, whose stirring score accompanies Harvey Fierstein’s book.

All the writing follows the short emotional journey made by these newsies who, led by firebrand Jack Kelly (Michael Ahomka-Lindsay), begin the show as zeroes and end it as heroes. Not much narratively happens in between. But the story is not really the point of this show. It is the dancing.

The set pieces are all about conveying the exhilaration of new-found empowerment as this most neglected and vulnerable strand of New York society take on Cameron Blakely’s dastardly Pulitzer.

To that end dizzying pirouettes, awe-inspiring somersaults, impossible leaps and tumbles are all synchronised and drilled by Matt Cole’s direction and choreography down to the smallest gesture. No sooner have they finished one breathless routine, they beginner another.

True, the love interest between Jack and budding news reporter Katherine Plumber (Bronté Barbé) could have been drawn from Writing Romance for Dummies.

But both Barbé and Ahomka-Lindsay — who was also terrific in the Regents Park Open Air theatre’s production of Legally Blonde last summer — flesh the roles out with plenty of charisma.

Producers Disney probably didn’t intend to time this show to coincide with the biggest wave of industrial action this country has seen in generations.

But for unions and general public alike it serves as a fist-pumping reminder of why the right to withhold labour is so necessary. That is if the transport strikes don’t prevent them from getting there.