A Broadway musical based on S.E. Hinton’s classic young adult novel The Outsiders opened Thursday, and critics are mostly pleased with the adaptation.
The Outsiders, which Hinton wrote when she was 16, was published in 1967. It tells the story of two Tulsa, Oklahoma, gangs who are at war with each other: the “Greasers” and the “Socs.”
The musical adaptation features a book by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine and music and lyrics by Levine and the folk band Jamestown Revival. Danya Taymor directs a cast that includes Brody Grant, Sky Lakota-Lynch, Joshua Boone, Brent Comer, and Jason Schmidt.
At the New York Times, Jesse Green had qualified praise for the show, writing that “the structural problems mean its achievements don’t stick. But they’re still achievements, and a show need not be for the ages to be for the moment.”
Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post was more enthusiastic, praising Grant’s “sublime” performance and writing that the musical is “driven by authenticity, earnestness, youth and ample heart.”
At the Guardian, Adrian Horton wrote that the production is “the platonic ideal of a retro classic rebooted for Broadway, broadly appealing to audiences young and old…but not particularly searing, recognizable but not terribly distinct, sincere and competent yet not resounding.”
Sara Holdren of Vulture also found the show enjoyable but flawed, writing that it “sometimes traffics, perhaps unavoidably, in cliché, [but] it makes up for it with the tenderness and muscle of not just its songs but its staging and performances.”
The Outsiders is currently playing at the Jacobs Theatre in New York.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
