The Outsiders (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

When the audience cheered after the famous rumble between the Greasers and the Socs in the new musical version of The Outsiders, I wondered if it was too beautifully staged to truly demonstrate the horrific violence we are meant to reject in the story’s final moments.

Based on the SE Hinton novel and the Francis Ford Coppola film, there is no shortage of visually arresting moments like the rumble in Danya Taymor’s production.  With a keen combination of sound, lighting, and movement, she creates some powerful vignettes on stage. But overall, I struggled with what the musical was saying about any of the themes it was dabbling in.

The musical, with a book by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine, largely tracks the plot of the book. Since his parents died in a car crash not too long ago, Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant) lives with his brothers Sodapop (Jason Schmidt) and Darrel (Brent Comer). Ponyboy pushes back when Darrel tries to parent him. He is 14 and in high school and might be the first one in their family to graduate and go to college. He is one of the poorer kids from the wrong side of town, known as the Greasers. The guys from his neighborhood are always doing battle the Socs, the rich kids from the other side of town. His best friend is Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch), who is quiet and skittish after the Socs beat him to a pulp.

One night at the drive-in, Ponyboy meets Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman), Queen of the Socs, and finds a kindred spirit. She too doesn’t quite fit into the world she inhabits. They talk about sunsets, Dickens, and together they despise the never-ending violence between their groups.

But their friendship is short-lived. Cherry’s boyfriend Bob targets Ponyboy after seeing them together at the drive-in. The Socs decide to attack Ponyboy, nearly drowning him, and to stop this, Johnny stabs Bob. Ponyboy and Johnny go on the run and lean on the local delinquent Dallas Winston (Joshua Boone) to help them out.

The relationships that are so key to the novel (and subsequently the film) are undernourished here. Blood family is centered here more than friendship or the extended/found family of the Greasers.

Worse this concept of “family” gets over-hammered in narrative and song. It’s a super-straightforward message—sometimes family doesn’t totally get you but they are trying and they love you. Not a revolutionary statement. Yet somehow this gets so much stage time like we’ve never seen the concept of family before. All this talk of family leaves other (perhaps more interesting) character dynamics on the cutting room floor, so to speak.

I expected to see some element of a tender, complex image of male friendship, love and affection but the friendship between Ponyboy and Johnny is so unspoken in the musical it is practically invisible. You have to really strain to look for it in the performances and even then, it is fleeting.

Same, with the connections between Johnny and Dallas (both played by actors of color here) who are dealing with very specific elements of their outsiderness (race, domestic violence, police brutality) but the musical does not give them enough space/time.

Was there some fear they would lose the student group audience if any boy was remotely tender to another? I’m not even asking for a rigorously queer reading of these relationships. SpongeBob and Patrick (one of my favorite male friendship musicals) share their feelings more clearly in SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical. If you are being lapped by a sponge, I think you have a problem.

The concept of the Greasers here feels like lip service to the book but not an authentic mood generated by the show. The generic ensemble dance numbers and colorless upbeat songs don’t help in that matter. For the amount of pain the characters are carrying, the songs don’t reflect that. Something about the universe built by this musical is disingenuous and I’m still trying to figure out exactly why.

The light country, folk numbers by Jamestown Revival only occasionally hit on something larger than themselves. “Great Expectations” is a number that steps it up and with Taymor staging the actors in spotlights all isolated across the stage the idea of “outsiderness” is furthered. They are singing together but they are not together.

This tension between the group, family, and individual disconnection, is at the heart of the material but is not at the heart of this musical. It’s like the musical picked a thematic lane and didn’t allow this tension to co-exist.

The Greasers are not a monolith and yet sometimes they act together for their self-preservation. They have a code to protect one another even if they can disagree amongst themselves. But I’m not sure I ever felt that collective—yes I saw actions they took and they told me they were looking out for each other but musically not so much. When the music is just twisting my arm to believe in blood family ties (I GET IT), it keeps cutting against this ragtag other family concept.

This is the kind of material you want to fall in love with a thousand times over. You want to feel that sweeping sense of the fragility of life, the vulnerability of teenage boys to violence and harm, and a heightened emotional rollercoaster of youth. (Watch the Korean TV drama Weak Hero: Class 1 if you want to see a contemporary take on these same themes and have a good long cry).

I expected to have a BIG cry at The Outsiders but as I left the musical, I was not thinking about youth at all. Everyone is too pretty, chiseled, and dancy. Yeah, it’s a Broadway musical and maybe in this post-Marvel era it’s abs 8-days-a-week for everyone. But abs feel like the opposite of something fragile, mortal, and vulnerable.

Which brings us back to the stylized movement of the rumble. The scene, staged in the rain, is slowed down, the movement ritualistic and sculptural. It is performed as a mob of Socs and Greasers moving in sync. Fists are throw, jaws are hit. Bodies roll all as one. How is this the greatest moment of togetherness the story offers? It’s such a mismatch of art and purpose.

There were several gorgeous moments in the show like this but the others were more narratively effective. The lighting darkens, sound becomes disembodied, and everything moves in slow motion. A boy being hit in the head leaves us all with a ringing in our ears. A loss of consciousness, thrashing underwater is projected, and there is a crackling sound like a life could be ended.

I really liked these individual creative choices (the lighting and sound design throughout were exquisite), but when the show falls more into traditional Broadway number territory, I wanted to throw something. Do we need a useless upbeat number about the drive-in? No. Do we really believe Cherry when she says her now-dead-ex was a good person inside. Why are you even telling me this? Socs are people too. But I’m not sure we need to “both sides” this.

I’m frustrated because the musical is working with interesting material that has so much potential but it ends up not saying much at all.

Well, except “go home Ponyboy.” I guess we all should call our mothers/fathers/caretaking relatives who love us but don’t get us.