A `Kid' For The '90S -- Annex Sets Legendary Newspaper Cartoon To Music

----------------------------------------------------------------- Theater preview

"The Yellow Kid" by Brian Faker and Bliss Kolb, opening tonight at Annex Theatre, 1916 Fourth Ave. Thursdays-Saturdays through Oct. 14; 728-0933. -----------------------------------------------------------------

All right, you amateur historians of newspaper history and American slang: Where did the phrase "yellow journalism" come from?

Seattle actor-writer Brian Faker has the answer. He traces that expression, now synonymous with screaming headlines and tabloid alarmism, to a bald, oversized child in a long white nightgown nicknamed The Yellow Kid.

The Kid - whose proper name was Mickey Dougan - was a street urchin cartoon character devised in 1895 by newspaper artist and inventor Richard Felton Outcault. And he is being brought to life onstage at the Annex Theatre in the new musical play "The Yellow Kid," co-authored by Faker and Bliss Kolb.

According to Faker's research, the Kid was the very first ongoing comic strip character - and the first to have his brash remarks circled in balloons. He made his debut in the daily New York World on May 5, 1895, as a smart-mouthed, outspoken little ruffian in an imaginary Irish-American tenement dubbed"Hogan's Alley."

"The Kid was an overnight sensation," Faker notes. "There was a Broadway musical about him. There were Yellow Kid buttons, and toys, lots of merchandising hooks. Outcault was a good artist, but also a whiz at marketing."

Explores artist and his creation

Interspersing documented remarks by Outcault, his inventor friend Thomas Edison and other famous men of the era, along with cartoon fantasy sequences and songs (by Doug Wieselman and Gina Leishmann), dances and multimedia projections, the production alternately examines the artist and his funny paper alter ego.

And it ranges in feeling, say its creators, between a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and the experimental dramas of Maria Irene Fornes and Ping Chong.

The show chronicles how, despite the mass popularity of the Yellow Kid (played by Seanjohn Walsh) in the "Gay '90s," Outcault (Adrian LaTourelle) eventually bowed to pressure from mogul publisher William Randolph Hearst to create a less ragged, more palatable and prosperous cartoon child. One that would not remind readers of the poverty and social tensions percolating in America's burgeoning immigrant slums.

The Kid's replacement, Buster Brown, "was much more of a good, clean boy, a society version of the Yellow Kid, who got into trouble but always learned a little moral lesson from it," observes Faker.

"The thrust of our play is the decisions an artist makes - what do you do just for the bucks, and what do you do for your heart's inspiration? In the end Outcault actually murders the Kid, symbolically destroying something in himself."

Low-budget production

The struggle to earn a living while maintaining one's artistic integrity is one that Faker, 35, a versatile stage actor with credits in many Seattle theaters, knows intimately. Currently living on unemployment benefits, he scrambled together $1,100 to finance this shoestring fringe production.

"We're doing `Miss Saigon' at the Annex," he laughs. "We've got 27 actors, a cat, a goat, two dogs, 200 slide projections, film, rolling scenery. It's just a monster.

"We're funding this completely out of pocket - and out of favors. My wife (actress Peggy Poage) is probably our biggest contributor. And a lot of other people just decided to go insane with me on this."

For this outing, Faker drew on another recent experience putting up a show on a wing and a prayer.

This summer he and several colleagues mounted the classic comedy "Slave Island" in the bar of the Pink Door Restaurant. It was a hit that actually covered their expenses, and paid them a small stipend.

"I think theater in taverns and bars may be the way to go in the future," Faker suggests. "We're losing our government funding for the arts, but not our desire to make art. I'm very proud of what we've been able to accomplish in `Slave Island' and `The Yellow Kid' with zero money. But it's an ongoing battle."

Next time Faker-the-producer swears he'll handle things a little differently. "I wouldn't do another project this big without about five grand in the bank to pay the bills," he sighs. "But I'm not giving up. At one point in our play Tom Edison asks Outcault, `When are you going to grow up?' If he asked me that I'd say, I hope never."