On the Road With ‘The Outsiders,’ Where the Greasers and Socs Rumbled

“‘Outsiders’ is the first novel I read, front to back,” Boone mentioned. He was in fifth grade, and it made an instantaneous impression. “It was the first time I witnessed that white people could treat other white people the way that I was treated as a Black person,” he mentioned.

Boone and the remainder of the ensemble are extra energized than nervous by the prospect of remodeling this adored property into a brand new medium.

“Since 1967, people who have read this novel have invested their souls and their time into putting on the shoes of Ponyboy, reading the narrator as themselves,” Grant mentioned. “It just makes me really want to not let those people down.” (Boone, who’s been on Broadway earlier than, and serves as a sort of ringleader for his youthful castmates, had grander ambitions. “I want to break the world with this show,” he mentioned.)

They are palpably devoted. Jason Schmidt, who performed Sodapop, the charismatic center Curtis brother, in La Jolla and reprises it on Broadway, obtained a tattoo of a vintage-looking cola bottle on his forearm, together with his character’s title beneath. “I tend to be a little bit more of a thinker,” he mentioned. “It reminds me to be loose.”

An inspiring drive

Over Italian meals with Hinton, the actors peppered her with questions on her teenage life (who did she have a crush on? Michael Landon, circa “Bonanza,” she mentioned, drawing clean stares), the real-life Greasers and Socs in her orbit (she knew the sort, she mentioned, however didn’t base the characters on anybody), and dealing with Coppola, with whom she went on to adapt one other of her books, “Rumble Fish.” In a purple blazer and with a sly, soft-spoken wit, she was an unlikely septuagenarian influencer, the 20-something dudes (and Pittman) hanging on her each phrase.