Belle wanted much more than this provincial life. Louisa just wanted much more. Jack wished for the wide-open spaces of Santa Fe. Jack’s mother (different Jack) wished a lot of things. Now, Ponyboy Curtis gets to join musical theater’s long list of aspiring, desiring hearts. They’re not all teenagers, but adolescence clearly lends itself to the restless certainty that — as Ponyboy puts it in his take on the “I want” song — “there’s so much more to life / Than what’s in front of me” — and lord knows puberty makes you emotional enough to start wailing, melodically or otherwise. Perhaps that’s why The Outsiders slides more easily than might be expected into musical form. S.E. Hinton wrote the novel when she was only 16, a high-school junior in Oklahoma about to become best-seller famous, and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 movie not only starred baby versions of a frankly absurd number of future celebrities; it also helped launch the Brat Pack, whose members might not have been Romeo and Juliet or Joan of Arc but were certainly up there on history’s list of most famous teenagers (or at least people who played teenagers on TV). The particular pangs and passions of being young — and, specifically, young and poor and in the middle of nowhere — are what The Outsiders is all about. The American musical, with the ache and drive of “I want” at its core, is good for that.
And in its new musical form — with a score and lyrics by the folk duo Zach Chance and Jonathan Clay, known as Jamestown Revival, along with Justin Levine — The Outsiders is taking a real swing at being the strongest entry in this season’s wave of singer-songwriter outings on Broadway. We’re living in a post–Sara Bareilles age: Ingrid Michaelson, PigPen Theatre Co., Shaina Taub, and Anaïs Mitchell are all currently waving at one other from around Times Square. But whether or not the same people who make catchy pop records can also craft a solid score is another question. Chance, Clay, and Levine can, and if The Outsiders sometimes traffics, perhaps unavoidably, in cliché, it makes up for it with the tenderness and muscle of not just its songs but its staging and performances.
In Adam Rapp’s book (also co-written with Levine), Ponyboy (Brody Grant) is our 14-year-old narrator, born and raised, as Hinton was, in Tulsa. To quote another singer-songwriter, it’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap, and Ponyboy scribbles furiously in his notebook, reads Dickens, idolizes Paul Newman, and dreams of escape. It’s 1967 — we love a cuffed jean, an unfiltered cigarette, and a nickname — and Ponyboy and his two older brothers, Darrel and Sodapop, played by Brent Comer and Jason Schmidt respectively, live alone after the death of their parents in a car crash. (Side note: There’s something endearing about all the places where Hinton’s story, precocious as she was, signals that it was written by a teen. What literary-leaning kid hasn’t at some point contemplated the mystique of orphandom?) Darry works, while Ponyboy and Soda spend most of their time with their chosen family, one of the town’s two rival gangs: the Greasers. “You’ve got Greasers and Socs,” Ponyboy sings to us, “that’s how it’s always been / And that’s probably how it’s always gonna go.” “Soc” is short for “socialite” (the plural is two syllables, like cloches), so you can guess which gang comes from which side of the tracks.
Since Ponyboy holds the literal pen and paper, it’s doubly his story. “You have a gift,” his brother Darry tells him, and the show can’t resist leaning into the “write your way out” trope that’s fueled inky-fingered protagonists from Jo March to Alexander Hamilton. But The Outsiders is best on the inside of its narrator’s frame, when it embraces the community of its title. As a group, the Greasers are a scrappy, lovable bunch with powerful pipes and plenty of slick moves. Schmidt is a total darling as the happily un-intellectual Sodapop: He’s a teddy bear inside a body builder, and when he peels off his shirt early in the evening, the whoops in the audience are only half as funny as the dopey grin he cracks in response. With a clear, plaintive voice and the hunched shoulders of worries beyond his years, Comer makes strong work out of what could be a thankless part, and Joshua Boone is especially excellent as his foil, the charismatic Dallas Winston. Rebellious Dally gets under responsible Darry’s skin — in this adultless world, they are the father figures competing for the younger boys’ respect and love. But what neither Darry nor the rest of the Greasers see until it’s too late is that Dally’s alpha swagger conceals wells not only of real kindness but of terror and despair. Boone makes sure we never miss the layers. His voice is gorgeous and controlled, all the more so when it gets soft — he nails both the propulsive first-act closer “Run Run Brother” and its heartbreaking sequel song, “Little Brother,” in Act 2. In a way, he feels like a more ancient soul — some noble, doomed warrior of antiquity, trapped in Tulsa and soldiering toward the play’s sharpest tragedy.
There’s also a fem Greaser called Ace, played with spark by Tilly Evans-Krueger — Ace hadn’t been added to the program when I saw the show, and while that’s fortunately been remedied since, it’s still too bad that Evans-Krueger isn’t pictured in the cuddle puddle on all the production’s marketing materials. Whether or not she exists in Hinton’s or Coppola’s worlds makes no difference — here, she and her frequent counterpart, the waggish Two-Bit (Daryl Tofa), dance like devils and tumble like acrobats. They’re a vital part of the Greaser family and of the show’s high-octane choreography by the brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman. Along with director Danya Taymor, the Kupermans have built an exhilarating movement world for The Outsiders, especially in the brutal “rumble” that goes down between the Socs and the Greasers at the show’s climax. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that The Notebook gets epically out-rained, and — working in militarily precise tandem with the flashes and crashes of Brian MacDevitt’s lights and Cody Spencer’s sound design — Taymor creates a spectacular ballet of violence. She’s constantly and compellingly repurposing the basic elements of the show’s gritty warehouselike set (its old tires, boards, and jungle-gym scaffolding by Tatiana Kahvegian and the design collective AMP), and both mid-rumble and elsewhere, she suspends time to great effect. Moments of impact stretch into the molasses of slow-motion while frigid LEDs half-blind us; the actors’ bodies float and arc through space before smashing back into action — choreographed in tight unison at one moment, released into apparent chaos in the next. It’s a great trick: Not only does it facilitate agile leaps into Ponyboy’s frame narration — it also makes the hits land harder than they ever could under the constraints of realism.
And there is a lot of hitting in The Outsiders. From one angle, it’s a story about being born into violence and looking for a way to create rather than destroy. Ponyboy and his friends and the cruel, insecure preps from across town beat the shit out of each other in the park between their neighborhoods because “that’s how it’s always been.” But it’s not just Ponyboy who yearns for something else. Even Bob (Kevin William Paul), nastiest of the Socs and their khaki-wearing king, is credited with more of a heart than we ever get to see. “When it was only you and me alone,” sings his erstwhile girlfriend, Cherry Valence (Emma Pittman), “I saw a side of you I wish they’d known / Like a secret you could never share.” It’s hard to believe, and maybe we don’t believe it, but it still matters that she says it: Cherry also sees the yearning and the intelligence inside Ponyboy. She’s perceptive, and compassionate at heart, and through her we get a little glimpse into how the privileged perpetrators are, though it may not excuse them, also victims.
But The Outsiders’s most persecuted young sufferer is undoubtedly Ponyboy’s best friend, Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch), lovingly called “Johnnycakes” by his friends. Slight and wounded looking, with the big dark eyes and the hesitant gaze of a hunted animal, Lakota-Lynch’s Johnny is a bruised and hungry soul, full of sweetness that’s never gotten to flourish — but which emerges in full glory in “Stay Gold,” the show’s ballad interpretation of the movie’s most famous line. The Outsiders has long been a favorite for speculation about romantic undertones between its characters, and despite Hinton’s denial that anyone in the story is anything other than straight, there’s a delicacy in the musical’s approach to Johnny that feels like it leaves things open in a truthful way. These are all kids — who they are is shifting every second, and what they haven’t been able, or allowed, to articulate about themselves yet is a vast wilderness. The tragedy lies in never being able to find out.
The Outsiders is at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.
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Sara Holdren , 2024-04-12 03:00:12
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