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

Theater review

THE OUTSIDERS

2 hours and 30 minutes, with one intermission. At the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 W. 45th St.

When I first learned that the musical “The Outsiders,” which opened Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, would include a song called “Stay Gold,” I laughed.

Wouldn’t you? The words “Stay gold, Ponyboy,” from author S.E. Hinton’s 1967 young adult novel about warring Oklahoma gangs, have achieved an almost “Here’s looking at you, kid” or “I am your father” cultural status.

Made even more famous by Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 movie, the old phrase has been repeated so much over the decades that its meaning has mostly given way to cheesiness and eye-rolls.

And then the wonderful Sky Lakota-Lynch, as Johnny Cade, began to sing it.

“Finding beauty in the fold is the only way to keep from growing old. My friend, stay gold,” goes the number by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance of the band Jamestown Revival and Justin Levine.

I wasn’t laughing anymore. Quite the opposite.

The tender tune, accompanied by an acoustic guitar, is not only the most beautiful in any new musical this season — it’s a moment of pure catharsis that’s been missing from the past several years of Broadway shows.

The song turns out to be representative of the entire shattering-yet-optimistic musical it’s part of. Driven by authenticity, earnestness, youth and ample heart, “The Outsiders” is very much an outsider itself.

The enriching story is chiefly about 14-year-old Ponyboy, a member of the Greasers, a working-class Tulsa gang, who buries himself in literature and secretly writes fiction to escape the troubles swirling around him.

Newcomer Brody Grant, with a record-deal-ready voice and a grounded teenage vulnerability, makes a sublime debut in the role. He’s the sort of bookworm heartthrob you’re more likely to find on Netflix nowadays than Broadway.

But the shrewdness of director Danya Taymor’s production starts with how brilliantly cast it is, from top to bottom. By the end of the opening song, called “Tulsa ’67,” we have somehow already met and grown inexplicably fond of every single Greaser.

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

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

Not trying to tackle too much, however, turns out to be one of “The Outsiders'” foremost virtues.

Many readers will see songs and gangs and think, “Sharks and Jets?” And, yes, like in “West Side Story,” “The Outsiders” also has a rumble — a breathtakingly visceral one choreographed by Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman with unison jabs under a full-stage downpour.

But Pony ain’t Tony. This is a softer and more intimate tale, not a grandly Shakespearean love story, of painfully arbitrary tragedies that still haunt evening newscasts. Each in their unique way, the Greasers are those poor, sensitive souls who are unwillingly caught up in society’s ugliness. The Socs, too, even if they’re more flatly conceived.

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

Unlike many choppy stage adaptations of novels or films, in which a poorly written scene is nothing more than a means to another commodity ballad, Adam Rapp and Levine’s focused book fuses almost indistinguishably with the twangy, Great Plains-style score. One bleeds into the other.

The same is true of the staging. Taymor, by the way, is the rare straight-play director whose drama skillset translates instantly to musical theater. She gives spoken-word sections reality and grit, and then seconds later lets her characters dance dreamily across actual grit — a soft gravel that blankets the stage and flies into the air as the ensemble jumps and kicks.

Tatiana Kahvegian and AMP’s set is a wide garage, with an oversize tire cleverly transforming into an outdoor water well and the hood of a car becoming Ponyboy’s bed.

The show wavers briefly at the start of the second act when Ponyboy and Johnny sit too far upstage in a quiet church. That’s a quibble, though. Soon enough, it is powerfully refueled by the violent battle, Boone’s pressure-cooker song “Little Brother” and Lakota-Lynch’s tear-jerker that segues into a gorgeous duet with Grant.

His Ponyboy has been through hell, and Grant has impressively faded into a ghost of what a well-adjusted teenage boy should be.

But the resilient character still finds a way to “stay gold”: a phrase that, for the time being anyway, will make my eyes water — not roll.