The Outsiders
La Jolla Playhouse, La Jolla, through April 9 ★★★
There’s a new musical based on S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, and it’s “a thrilling mess,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. Hinton’s coming-of-age tale set amid a 1967 street war between two Tulsa teenage gangs could easily have been a typical Broadway-ready commercial treatment. But I left the theater “exhilarated by the artistic risk-taking” and impressed by Brody Grant’s “star-making” performance as Ponyboy, the story’s soulful 14-year-old protagonist. Ponyboy is a member of the working-class Greasers, and when he and his gang brothers take on the affluent Socs, “the violence is made real, even when it’s stylized.”
“The great allure of the book, and now the musical, are the big feelings that it illustrates and invites,” said Alexis Soloski in The New York Times. The young male heroes have “rich and ardent emotional lives,” as playwright Adam Rapp clearly understands, and the emotionalism fuels the plaintive folk-rock score by Jamestown Revival. The music drops away entirely, though, during the climactic rumble scene, letting roughly 20 young bodies “supply their own percussive music, falling to the cork-covered floor, groaning into their mikes, as stage rain soaks them through.” It’s one of several powerful choices that give this production, with its “correctable missteps,” a strong chance of reaching Broadway. “Awkward, yearning, fast on its feet, the show, like the adolescents it describes, is still trying on various identities,” and it hasn’t quite figured out the right one yet. “When it reaches its full height, it might really be something to see.”