THE OUTSIDERS – Hollywood Pantages Theatre
Hollywood Pantages Theater
October 1, 2026 Opening Night
Reviewed by Chris Cassone cc@chriscassone.com
The pre-show tableau was the perfect setup. Ponyboy Curtis, played with magnetic warmth and restless energy by Norman White, slipped quietly into place beside the proscenium at stage right. He sat there almost unnoticed, writing as the audience found its seats.
Before a word was spoken, we understood something about him. Ponyboy was a thinker. A writer. A kid trying to work out something bigger than himself. We will be hearing and seeing more of Mr. White. He’s that good.
Anyone who has been paying attention since 1967, when S. E. Hinton’s instant classic was published, knows the basic terrain: teenage angst in a Midwestern town where the cut of your hair, the clothes you wore, and especially the neighborhood you came from could determine how you were treated and how far you were expected to go. In Tulsa, that meant the poorer Greasers of the East Side and the upper-middle-class Socs, pronounced “sōshes,” from the West Side.
Fresh from its Broadway run, where it won four Tony Awards including Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical, The Outsiders arrives with a muscular Americana, folk, hip-hop and country-inflected score by Jamestown Revival. Director Danya Taymor and her creative team place the action on an industrial, highly adaptable set transformed by remarkably inventive lighting. The same skeletal landscape becomes the Curtis home, a treehouse, the space behind a drive-in theater, and any number of anonymous Tulsa battlegrounds.
And when this production says rumble, it means movement.
The choreography is some of the most thrilling physical storytelling I have seen in a musical since the Sharks and Jets collided in Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story. Bodies leap, spin, collide and sail across the stage. A knockout, a blow or a moment of violence can be punctuated by enormous panels of white light exploding around the performers, followed by sudden darkness. The effect is almost physical. For a split second, the audience experiences the disorientation of the person taking the punch.
At the center of the story are the Curtis brothers, left without parents after a fatal car accident. Oldest brother Darrel must somehow be both father and brother to Sodapop and Ponyboy. When a group of Socs nearly drowns Ponyboy, Johnny intervenes and kills Bob, one of their attackers. That single act sets off the tragic chain of events that follows: the boys run away, become unlikely heroes after rescuing children from a burning church, and eventually return to a conflict that has become about far more than territory. Pride, identity, loyalty, and family are all at stake.
They use Dickens’ Great Expectations with a masterful touch. Ponyboy loves the novel, and there is something wonderfully innocent in the way he explains it to Cherry. The parallel is easy to grasp without being overstated: Dickens’ story of class, ambition, and expectation sits neatly beside a 1967 Tulsa where teenagers are already being told who they are supposed to become. The song begins as a lovely duet, then opens up with the ensemble into something genuinely soaring.
Strong performances compete for attention throughout the evening. Tyler Jordan Wesley gives Dallas Winston a commanding presence, a young man recently released from a reformatory whose toughness gives him an almost gravitational pull among the Greasers. Yet beneath that bravado is volatility. When Dallas finally collapses under the accumulated weight of what has happened, the story turns back toward Ponyboy, the observer who must somehow make sense of everything the others cannot.
The romantic thread between Ponyboy and Cherry offers the possibility, however briefly, that the wall separating Greaser from Soc might be crossed. But The Outsiders is less interested in giving us a conventional boy-meets-girl resolution than in asking whether these young people can escape the identities their world has assigned them.
Ultimately, those identities collide in the Rumble.
The sequence is beautifully cinematic. Performers are hurled, lifted and driven across the stage in choreography timed to flashes of light and bursts of darkness. Instead of trying to reproduce movie violence literally, the production turns it into something more impressionistic and theatrical. The lighting becomes impact. Movement becomes injury. For several astonishing minutes, the Pantages stage seems barely large enough to contain it.
If you are a fan of Hinton’s novel, which has sold more than 15 million copies, Francis Ford Coppola’s now-cult film adaptation, or even the short-lived television series, this stage version offers another compelling way into the story.
But it does not survive merely on nostalgia.
With its soaring harmonies, muscular score, inventive staging and exhilarating choreography, The Outsiders finds something new inside material many of us thought we already knew by heart. And perhaps that is why Ponyboy is sitting there writing before the show even begins.
He is trying to understand what happened.
By the end of the evening, so are we.
THE OUTSIDERS runs through October 18 at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre; eight performances weekly. Tickets: https://www.broadwayinhollywood.com/
PHOTOS BY MATTHEW MURPHY
ust opened. Check back for REVIEW.