‘The Outsiders’ Broadway review: Warring teens tug at the heart in one of the season’s best new musicals

When I initial learned that the musical “The Outsiders,” which opened Thursday evening at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, would include a track identified as “Stay Gold,” I laughed.

Would not you? The words “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” from creator S.E. Hinton’s 1967 youthful grownup novel about warring Oklahoma gangs, have accomplished an pretty much “Here’s on the lookout at you, kid” or “I am your father” cultural status. 

Created even more popular by Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 motion picture, the outdated phrase has been repeated so considerably in excess of the a long time that its meaning has primarily given way to cheesiness and eye-rolls.

And then the great Sky Lakota-Lynch, as Johnny Cade, started to sing it.

“Finding elegance in the fold is the only way to continue to keep from rising old. My friend, stay gold,” goes the amount by Jonathan Clay and Zach Prospect of the band Jamestown Revival and Justin Levine.

I was not laughing any more. Quite the opposite.

The tender tune, accompanied by an acoustic guitar, is not only the most lovely in any new musical this period — it’s a minute of pure catharsis that’s been missing from the earlier many a long time of Broadway displays.

The song turns out to be agent of the overall shattering-nevertheless-optimistic musical it is portion of. Pushed by authenticity, earnestness, youth and sufficient coronary heart, “The Outsiders” is really substantially an outsider itself.

The enriching story is mainly about 14-calendar year-previous Ponyboy, a member of the Greasers, a doing the job-class Tulsa gang, who buries himself in literature and secretly writes fiction to escape the difficulties swirling around him.

Newcomer Brody Grant, with a report-offer-completely ready voice and a grounded teenage vulnerability, will make a elegant debut in the part. He’s the kind of bookworm heartthrob you are more very likely to uncover on Netflix at present than Broadway.

But the shrewdness of director Danya Taymor’s production commences with how brilliantly solid it is, from top to bottom. By the close of the opening tune, identified as “Tulsa ’67,” we have by some means already achieved and grown inexplicably fond of just about every one Greaser. 

There is respected leader Dallas (Joshua Boone), sweet Johnny (Lakota-Lynch) and mischievous Two-Bit (Daryl Tofa). Ponyboy’s moms and dads died in a teach crash, so he’s elevated by his two odd-pair brothers — the stern Darrel (Brent Comer) and goofy Sodapop (Jason Schmidt).

That rowdy lot’s mortal enemies are the Socs, the moneyed, letterman-jacket-sporting opposites from the other facet of the tracks. Of that pack, the musical only delves into the further side of Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman), a Soc girlfriend who will take an fascination in the atypically open-minded Ponyboy.

Not making an attempt to deal with too a great deal, having said that, turns out to be a single of “The Outsiders’” foremost virtues.

A lot of visitors will see music and gangs and imagine, “Sharks and Jets?” And, sure, like in “West Aspect Tale,” “The Outsiders” also has a rumble — a breathtakingly visceral a single choreographed by Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman with unison jabs below a entire-phase downpour.

But Pony ain’t Tony. This is a softer and additional intimate tale, not a grandly Shakespearean appreciate tale, of painfully arbitrary tragedies that even now haunt night newscasts. Every single in their unique way, the Greasers are individuals poor, sensitive souls who are unwillingly caught up in society’s ugliness. The Socs, way too, even if they’re far more flatly conceived.

The disappointment and scrappiness of the plot aside, there is an admirable grace to how “The Outsiders” was constructed.

Compared with quite a few choppy phase diversifications of novels or films, in which a badly penned scene is absolutely nothing additional than a means to a different commodity ballad, Adam Rapp and Levine’s centered ebook fuses virtually indistinguishably with the twangy, Good Plains-fashion score. A single bleeds into the other.

The same is legitimate of the staging. Taymor, by the way, is the exceptional straight-engage in director whose drama skillset translates quickly to musical theater. She presents spoken-word sections actuality and grit, and then seconds later on allows her figures dance dreamily across precise grit — a tender gravel that blankets the stage and flies into the air as the ensemble jumps and kicks.

Tatiana Kahvegian and AMP’s set is a broad garage, with an oversize tire cleverly reworking into an out of doors drinking water properly and the hood of a vehicle getting to be Ponyboy’s mattress.

The clearly show wavers briefly at the start out of the second act when Ponyboy and Johnny sit far too much upstage in a quiet church. Which is a quibble, while. Quickly sufficient, it is powerfully refueled by the violent fight, Boone’s pressure-cooker track “Little Brother” and Lakota-Lynch’s tear-jerker that segues into a attractive duet with Grant.

His Ponyboy has been by means of hell, and Grant has impressively faded into a ghost of what a perfectly-altered teenage boy should really be.

But the resilient character continue to finds a way to “stay gold”: a phrase that, for the time becoming in any case, will make my eyes drinking water — not roll.