Review: THE OUTSIDERS at Hollywood Pantages Theatre

One issue I had not considered about a musical adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s beloved children’s classic The Outsiders hit me right in the face as soon as the opening number began. A musical about disenfranchised teenage boys in warring gangs in the middle of the twentieth century has an impossibly high standard to measure up against in the department of subject matter. Could anyone but Jerome Robbins craft dances that feel masculine, violent, edgy, and fueled with enough angst to convey pent up frustrations of characters whose existences are at odds with their entire world? Although the tour of The Outsiders currently playing the Pantages is loaded with virtuosity— Danya Taymor’s ingenuity is on full display in the shadowy haze of Brian MacDevitt’s perfectly-cued lighting design— it is the kind of untethered virtuosity that makes the audience go “whoa!” and nothing more.

If I combined all the “whoa!”s and “cool!”s uttered by the woman behind me during the performance— often elicited as an ensemble member did a gymnastic trick or the lights shifted with intense precision— they could never add up to the reaction of the audience member escorted out of the opening night performance of Francesca Zambello’s recent West Side Story revival at LA Opera. As the patron became audibly inconsolable at Chino’s lethal gunshot, they were promptly shushed by other ticket holders. However, it was an indelibly beautiful part of the performance for me. Here was someone (I have no idea of their age, race, or gender— they were behind me and I did not turn around) who did not know what was going to happen. Here was a show with choreography preserved from its 1957 premiere, a libretto written nearly 70 years ago, and source material dating back centuries. And yet, across the expanses of time and space, Shakespeare, Bernstein, Sondheim, Laurents, and Robbins (aided deftly, of course, by Zambello) were able to stir this person to crying out. Not all art needs to make us cry out, and not all musicals need aim for that goal, but something about The Outsiders makes me feel like they would like us crying out. The show is too toothless, the songs too trite, and the characters too flat to ever muster such a human response. Though a popular ticket right now, I wonder how this musical— which boasts a Tony for Best New Musical, an accolade West Side Story was famously snubbed— will be perceived in 70 years. Will anyone cry out for Johnny Cade or Dally like we do for Tony? One wouldn’t try to write a musical about an Austrian postulant-turned-governess which omits the Anschluss, and in a similar way, I feel like certain subjects should be retired from musical adaptation.

Most of the libretto is expositional and feels like an unending reel of recitative. Each character has their chance to sing a song that could be titled “Here’s Why I’m Sad”, and each of those songs could be interchanged between characters with little effect to the overall piece. Some of the childish rhymes are startlingly basic. Like in Act II:

“But this war, it eats you up inside/

Till you're blinded by your foolish pride/

When you only see the world one way/

It's only black and white, but never grey.”

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