The Cast of The Outsiders (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

The Outsiders

By Marc Miller

If you were in high school in the late '60s or early '70s and had a streak of rebellious youth in you, chances are you got around to The Outsiders, S.E. Hinton's 1967 novel. Hinton, who was Susan Eloise Hinton but felt it better to use her initials because who wants to read a gang-warfare novel by, you know, a girl, caught the angst, class conflict, and desperate bonding of teens and young adults in the dry dust of her native Tulsa.

The Outsiders became an influential Francis Ford Coppola movie in 1983 starring just about everybody who was nobody but soon to become somebody, and now it's a Broadway musical. Despite a strong West Side Story vibe - a big climactic rumble, and a number urging the kids to "play it cool" - it might seem unlikely source material; how do you make inarticulate youth sing, and what kind of dialogue do you invent for them? But the librettists, Adam Rapp and Justin Levine, and the songwriters, Levine, Jonathan Clay, and Zach Chance, have met the challenge with skill and, above all, sincerity. The Outsiders doesn't entirely hang together, but it does sing, and it strikes deeper chords than most oh-I'm-so-young-and-nobody-understands-me musicals.

The Cast of The Outsiders (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

First, the production gets the period right. The skeletal set, by the design collective AMP and Tatiana Kahvegian, could be anywhere anytime, but the costumes, by Sarafina Bush, fairly scream 1967. The two rival high school gangs, the Greasers and the Socs, are defined by their couture: The Greasers, working-class kids from the wrong side of town, settle for jeans and torn T-shirts, while the Socs, short for socially privileged, go in for tony school jackets and stylish skirts for their girlfriends.

Barton Cowperthwaite, Dan Berry, RJ Higton, Kevin William Paul, Emma Pittman, Melody Rose, Sean Harrison Jones (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant), our Greaser protagonist, lives with his brothers, Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) and Darrel (Brent Comer), the college-age head of the family struggling to be an authority figure after the sudden death of their parents. Ponyboy, the youngest and by far the most articulate of the three, narrates a lot of the proceedings - way too much, if you ask me, in keeping with modern musical librettists' unfortunate penchant for telling rather than showing.

Grant's Ponyboy has an annoying habit of chewing his consonants and twisting his vowels into an unidentifiable accent where I can't always make out what he's saying or singing, and no way he's 14. But he does capture the sensitivity and yearning of a questioning misfit, a misfit even among his fellow Greasers. He also gets some of the most poetic lyrics. Clay, Chance, and Levine aren't any neater than the current norm: "Night"/"life" is the very first rhyme, and it's downhill from there. But how about this: Ponyboy's "I'm torn between what is and what could be/ It's hard to write the story when the story's writing me."

He's contentious with his loving but domineering big brother; tight with the loyal, not-too-bright Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch); and worshipful of Dallas (Joshua Boone), the swaggering Greaser who's always on the run and who fixes disasters. And one just happened. Ponyboy, finding unexpected simpatico with Cherry (Emma Pittman), the Soc girlfriend of rich-jerk Bob (Kevin William Paul), initiated events that led to a death, and escalated the Greaser-Soc antipathy up to let's-rumble level. Armed with Dallas's $50, a fortune for a teen in 1967, Ponyboy and Johnny hide out in a church in a neighboring town, the site of much of the longer, and better, second act.

Better because the first act, often staged rambunctiously by director Danya Taymor and choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, turns quieter, and focuses arrestingly on feelings - teenage feelings that often get onstage airings, in everything from Spring Awakening to The Prom to Next to Normal to The Gospel According to Heather to Superhero to Dear Evan Hansen, but seldom this affectingly.

Emma Pittman, Brody Grant (photo: Matthew Murphy)

Most of The Outsiders' most effective moments, in fact, are book scenes: a deeply felt getting-to-know-you between Ponyboy and Cherry, a tense battle for dominance over Ponyboy between Dallas and Darrel, and some Ponyboy-Johnny exchanges that triggered pin-drop silence in the audience. There are, to be sure, ear-caressing songs; the score is surprisingly laced with reflective folk and ingratiating light country, with some catchy period rock 'n' roll thrown in. There's also impressive stagecraft - notably that rumble, staged violently and excitingly, in a downpour, yet - though, with Brian Macdevitt's expressive but confusing time-lapse lighting, it's hard to tell who's winning. There's also a plot-changing fire, with real flames.

The Cast of The Outsiders (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

But what really sticks is what really stuck in the Hinton original: the yearning, the helplessness, the fervent friendships among social outcasts with no other outlet for their intense teenage emotions. These are for the most part presented beautifully, and it's rare, the teenage-focused musical that can resonate equally among present-day kids and 70-somethings who remember the first time they read The Outsiders.

I could quibble about how some of the choreography fails to express anything in particular; how Boone is just the handsome, charismatic Dallas we want up to his big scene, and then he overplays that; how most of the subsidiary Greasers and Socs lack personalities, and the Socs are almost cartoonishly awful. But weigh that against those pin-drop moments in the second act, when Ponyboy and Johnny are talking about nothing and yet about everything, when the long-simmering conflicts in the Curtis household boil over, when these plain-talking losers suddenly hit on a phrase of universal, touching eloquence. So let's just say, bravo tutti.

The Outsiders
At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45^th St.
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes
Tickets: Outsidersmusical.com