If Broadway must, for the same risk-averse pressures as Hollywood, keep rummaging through the library for more and more past touchstones to adapt, it could do worse than The Outsiders. SE Hinton’s seminal young adult novel has been a staple of middle and high school English classes for more than half a century for a reason. Though its once cutting-edge content, controversial for 1967 – violence, addiction, depression, realist descriptions of socio-economic struggle, endless cigarettes – no longer feel risqué in 2024, the novel bottled a certain timeless teenage angst. Hinton’s book, written when she was just 16 and published when she was a freshman in college, has long connected with young audiences also feeling disenfranchised, ostracized, doubted or just lost in a churn of emotion.
The Broadway musical version, with a book by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine, tries very earnestly to tap the vein of uncut yearning and pent-up frustration, with a light touch of Americana sound and a heavy emphasis on small-town dreams. Everyone involved, including executive producer Angelina Jolie, seems to be approaching the project in good faith to the legacy of the original (and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film), with genuine curiosity in wringing something new (and lyrical) out of these repressed teenagers and now old-timey slang. (Jolie reportedly got involved on the recommendation of her 15-year-old daughter Vivienne, who saw the musical in its first outing at the La Jolla Playhouse.) The production is the platonic ideal of a retro classic rebooted for Broadway, broadly appealing to audiences young and old (my showing was split between boomers and kids) but not particularly searing, recognizable but not terribly distinct, sincere and competent yet not resounding.
As in the novel, the show, directed by Danya Taymor (Pass Over), is narrated by Ponyboy Curtis (an appealing Brody Grant), a moony 14-year-old who dreams of leaving 1967 Tulsa and escapes his troubles through books and movies like Cool Hand Luke (the cavernous set, designed by the collective AMP, successfully doubles as a giant projection screen on multiple occasions, with projection design by Hana S Kim). In plaintive, perfunctory song – the music and lyrics from Levine and the Americana duo Jamestown Revival tinge standard show tunes with folk and a dash of pop-country – Ponyboy relays his uneasy state of affairs. His parents were killed in a car crash; his oldest brother Darrel (Brent Comer) works long, menial hours to keep the family afloat (and has multiple songs to express his frustration, justice for oldest siblings!); his handsome middle brother Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) is heartbroken and caught up in local gang of working-class kids known as the Greasers, led by a lone wolf out-of-towner named Dallas Winston (Joshua Boone).
The Greasers have a vicious rivalry with the richer, cross-town “Socs” (as in “socials”), who are “building up the west side while the east side falls apart”, as Grant sings, his voice rich and entreating, especially in the quieter moments. Brutal clique bitterness is an old story, one not made much more distinct here: the Greasers and Socs hate each other, yet Ponyboy connects with queen bee Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman) at an intra-gang drive-in over their mutual alienation; when their respective groups find out, horrible violence ensues, driving a reluctant Ponyboy and his beloved best friend Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch) out of town.
Though a classic book in its own right, the show’s drive-in dance-off, petty gang rivalries and rumbles remain in the shadows of such classic musicals as Grease and West Side Story, even if Taymor tries to differentiate it with more gritty, visceral spins on the violence. The moments from which you can’t come back – a concussion, a punch, a death – are rendered in near strobe-lit slow motion, glimpses and snippets rather than scenes. (The Outsiders also reminds us: is there any sound more portentous than that of an oncoming train?) You can see, in the searing flashes of designer Brian MacDevitt’s lights and staccato, gorgeous fight choreography by the brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, a more modern understanding of how trauma shreds memory, of how violence obliterates all it touches.
The Outsiders, one eye on the past and the other on the present, also strikes a tricky balance on race – not quite race-blind in its casting (the Coppola movie is distinctly white working class), but not didactic, either. The shiftiness of Johnny Cade’s jittery, nervous awareness (Lakota-Lynch is of Native American descent) and Dallas’s lament of being persecuted wherever he goes allows the audience to fill in the rest. Same for the minimalist, industrial set of rafters, scaffolding and wooden planks, 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 teenage emotion still peek through the story choices, even in a production this slick and generally by the numbers. In musical form, The Outsiders is at times overly, achingly sad, sometimes curiously staid, and always feeling in debt to something bigger. It is, I suppose, the feeling of a classic, done up for the present.
