If Broadway, due to the same risk-averse pressures as Hollywood, has to keep digging through the library to find more and more past touchstones to adapt to, it could be worse than The Outsiders. SE Hinton’s seminal young adult novel has been a staple of middle school and high school English classes for more than half a century for a reason. While its cutting-edge content, once controversial for 1967 (violence, addiction, depression, realistic descriptions of socio-economic struggle, endless cigarettes) no longer feels obscene in 2024, the novel has bottled a certain eternal teenage angst. Hinton’s book, written when she was just 16 and published as a freshman in college, has long connected with young audiences who feel disenfranchised, ostracized, doubtful, or lost in emotional turmoil.
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The Broadway musical version, with a book by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine, attempts to very seriously tap into a vein of unbroken longing and pent-up frustration, with a light touch of Americana sound and a heavy emphasis on small-town dreams. Everyone involved in the project, including executive producer Angelina Jolie, seems to approach the legacy of the original (and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film) with good will and a genuine curiosity to wring something new (and lyrical) out of these repressed teenagers. It looks like it’s getting closer. It’s old time slang. (Jolie is said to have gotten involved at the recommendation of her 15-year-old daughter, Vivienne, who saw the musical in its initial run at the La Jolla Playhouse.) The production is the platonic ideal of a retro classic rebooted for Broadway, with mass appeal. audiences young and old (the screening was split between Boomers and kids) but it’s not particularly searing, recognizable but not too distinctive, sincere and competent but still not resonant.
Like the novel, the series, directed by Danya Taymor ( Pass Over ), is narrated by Ponyboy Curtis (a charming Brody Grant), a 14-year-old drifter who dreams of leaving 1967 Tulsa and escaping his problems through books and movies. Like Cool Hand Luke (the massive set, designed by collective AMP, successfully doubles as a giant projection screen on many occasions, with projection design by Hana S Kim). The music and lyrics by Ponyboy, Levine, and Americana duo Jamestown Revival convey his uneasy state with a sad, sloppy song that spices up standard show tunes with folk and a dash of pop-country. His parents died in a car accident; eldest brother Darrel (Brent Comer) works long, unskilled hours to keep the family afloat (and has many songs expressing frustration, justice for his oldest siblings!); His handsome middle brother, Sodapop (Jason Schmidt), is heartbroken and entangled with a local gang of working-class kids known as the Greasers, led by a lone wolf from out of town named Dallas Winston (Joshua Boone).
The Greasers have a fierce rivalry with the wealthier, crosstown “Society” (as in “socialites”) who, as Grant says in his rich, pleading voice, are “building up the west side while the east side is falling apart.” especially in quiet moments. Ruthless clique rage is an old story, never more prominently expressed here: The Greasers and Socs hate each other, but Ponyboy links up with queen bee Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman) in an intra-gang drive-by shooting over their mutual alienation; When the groups involved learn of this, horrific violence ensues, driving a reluctant Ponyboy and his beloved best friend Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch) out of town.
Although a classic in its own right, the show’s drive-by dancing, petty gang rivalries, and ruckus are overshadowed by classic musicals like Grease and West Side Story, even as Taymor tries to differentiate it with grittier, visceral stories. turns into violence. The moments you can’t come back from (a concussion, a punch, a death) are presented in slow motion, snapshots and cutaways, almost with strobe lighting, rather than scenes. (Outsiders also remind us: Is there a more ominous sound than the sound of an oncoming train?) You can see an even more impressive sound in the staccato and searing glare of designer Brian MacDevitt’s lights, in the spectacular fight choreography of brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman. Modern understanding of how trauma shatters memory, how violence destroys everything it touches.
With one eye on the past and the other on the present, the Outsiders also strike a difficult balance when it comes to race; It’s not exactly race-blind in its casting (the Coppola film is clearly about the white working class), but it’s not didactic either. The subtlety of Johnny Cade’s taut, strained awareness (Lakota-Lynch is of Native American descent) and Dallas’s lament about being persecuted wherever he goes allow the audience to fill in the rest. Ditto for the minimalist, industrial beams, scaffoldings and planks of wood, the skeletons of projections – a drive-in movie theater, a billboard, an abandoned church where Ponyboy and Johnny hide out.
Hinton had a flair for melodrama; The extremes of youthful emotion are still evident in the story choices, even in such a slick production and numbers in general. In musical form, The Outsiders feels sometimes outrageous, achingly sad, sometimes curiously solemn, and always indebted to something greater. I guess it’s a classic feel adapted for today.