The Outsiders | Live Show Review – TOP 20 MUSICALS 2024: NO 2

Thom Geier
Tuesday, December 3, 2024

The Outsiders sparkles not just as an adaptation but a genuinely great American musical

The Greasers (images credit: Matthew Murphy)

The Outsiders boasts its showstopping set-pieces, but it stands out with a score, by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance of the indie folk duo Jamestown Revival along with Justin Levine, that truly understands how to use songs to tell a story onstage. The infectiously jangly opening number, ‘Tulsa ’67’, succeeds in ways that few modern Musical Theatre songs do: setting the scene in a particular time and place, introducing a broad range of characters in sharp detail and establishing the major themes of alienation and potential violence soon to be fleshed out. All in an irresistible tune featuring a plaintive melody, haunting harmonies, a syncopated hook and then a delayed foot-stomping chorus.

SE Hinton’s first novel reads a bit like West Side Story fan fiction in its depiction of teenage ‘greaser’ outcasts in 1960s Oklahoma who spar with the snooty, better-off socs (pronounced ‘soash’, short for ‘socials’). The tensions escalate when a sensitive greaser bookworm named Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant) forges a literary connection with preppy prom queen Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman, making the most of an underwritten role) – incensing her brutish soc boyfriend, Bob (Kevin William Paul).

It’s a simple young adult-ish wisp of a story – the socs remain one-dimensional villains. But the adaptation, by acclaimed playwright Adam Rapp with Levine, manages to update the story (and improve on Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film) in canny ways. Ponyboy’s go-to book is no longer Gone With the Wind but the more thematically apt Great Expectations – yielding a soaring and melodic ‘I wish’ song that encapsulates all of the character’s yearnings for a better life. As Ponyboy explains, the Dickens yarn is about ‘this orphan kid named Pip who falls in love with a rich girl. And there’s this pretty tough outlaw character who takes him under his wing’. That tough outlaw, an outwardly gruff ex-jailbird named Dallas (Joshua Boone), also meets a fate that’s less problematic and politically charged c2024.

Rapp’s biggest improvement may be the fleshing out of Ponyboy’s older brother Darrel, who’s dropped out of school after an auto accident killed their parents and now struggles to keep Ponyboy and middle son Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) fed, clothed and out of trouble – even as Ponyboy and his pal Johnny (Sky Lakota-Lynch) go on the lam after a street fight turns deadly. Brent Comer brings anguish to the role and his smooth but searing baritone elevates some of the most effective story-songs.

Despite his reservations, even Darrel is drawn into the climactic Act Two rumble – which director Danya Taymor stages in an electrifying, rain- drenched scene that showcases Rick and Jeff Kuperman’s muscular choreography and Brian MacDevitt’s striking lighting design. Taymor also deploys a simple, stylised set that seamlessly transforms a drive-in theatre into a barn or an abandoned church. Moreover, the stagecraft helps to disguise some of the plot weaknesses, particularly in Act Two.

Much of the show’s success rests on the slender shoulders of Brody Grant, a Broadway newbie who is onstage nearly the entire show as Ponyboy. Though he looks older than his 14-year-old character (even older than C Thomas Howell did in Coppola’s movie), he conveys the restlessness and confusion of a young not-quite man trapped in a dilemma that has spiralled far out of his control. Grant’s earnest, expressive face and soaring tenor connects you to the character and his journey from the opening number.

The Outsiders sparkles not just as an adaptation but a genuinely great American musical. The songs feel like organic engines driving a tragic story of class conflict and brotherly love to onstage moments with real heft. Plus, they boast a country-inflected energy and lyrics that match the plainspoken poetry of Robert Frost, another all-American writer that Ponyboy memorably namechecks. Who says that nothing gold can stay?