At New York’s Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, the Tony Award-winning musical turns S.E. Hinton’s classic into something visceral, intimate and spectacular. Attending with Deneen, Sir Michael Fomkin found a Broadway production that earns the rarest verdict: 10 out of 10.
NEW YORK — There are Broadway shows you admire, Broadway shows you enjoy, and then there are the rare productions that remind you why people have been gathering in darkened theaters for centuries: to feel something together.
The Outsiders is one of those productions.
I attended the show with Deneen at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre on West 45th Street, and from the moment we entered the auditorium — its stage already carrying the rough-edged visual language of S.E. Hinton’s world — there was a sense that this would not be an ordinary night at the theater.
It wasn’t.
My rating: 10/10.
That score is not offered casually. The Outsiders succeeds because it does something increasingly difficult in big-budget contemporary theater: it combines spectacle with sincerity. Beneath the lighting, choreography, music and extraordinary physicality is a remarkably simple human question: What happens to young people when the world decides who they are before they have had the chance to decide for themselves?
A Classic Story, Made Urgent Again
Based on S.E. Hinton’s landmark novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s film, the musical transports audiences to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1967. Ponyboy Curtis, Johnny Cade and their fellow Greasers live on one side of an economic and social divide; the wealthier Socs occupy the other. Friendship, class, violence, loyalty and the longing for a different future propel the story.
Those themes could easily feel like artifacts from another America. Instead, director Danya Taymor and the creative team make them feel startlingly contemporary.
The production understands that The Outsiders has never really been about hairstyles, leather jackets or teenage rivalries. It is about belonging. It is about the invisible borders created by money and opportunity. And, above all, it is about young people searching for dignity in circumstances they did not choose.
That is where this musical finds its emotional power.
The current Broadway company is led by Noah Pacht as Ponyboy Curtis, Caleb Mathura as Johnny Cade and SeQuoiia as Dallas Winston, alongside Dan Berry as Darrel Curtis, Sutton James Kaylor as Sodapop Curtis, Emma Pittman as Cherry Valance and Daryl Tofa as Two-Bit Matthews. The new principal company began performances in March 2026.
The ensemble performs with an intensity that often makes the distinction between acting, dancing and stage combat disappear. Bodies collide, friendships fracture, and moments of tenderness arrive almost unexpectedly.
You don’t simply watch these young men fight. You understand what they are fighting for.
The Staging Is Extraordinary
The production’s physical vocabulary is perhaps its greatest theatrical achievement.
Rick and Jeff Kuperman’s choreography gives the story a muscular, dangerous energy, while the scenography by AMP featuring Tatiana Kahvegian creates a world that feels simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic. Brian MacDevitt’s lighting, Hana S. Kim’s projections and Cody Spencer’s sound design transform the Jacobs Theatre into something closer to a cinematic memory unfolding in real time.
There are sequences in The Outsiders that are so precisely constructed that you momentarily forget how technically complicated they must be.
That is the highest compliment I can give stagecraft: you stop seeing the machinery and start feeling the moment.
The violence is particularly effective because it is not presented merely as spectacle. Movement, sound, lighting and silence work together until a confrontation can seem suspended between reality and memory. The production knows when to overwhelm the audience — and, just as importantly, when to become quiet.
Taymor has spoken about the importance of silence in the production, and that restraint matters. The quieter passages give the explosive sequences their weight.
A Score With Dirt Under Its Fingernails
The music and lyrics by Jamestown Revival — Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance — and Justin Levine resist the temptation to make 1967 Tulsa sound artificially polished.
Instead, the score carries elements of folk, Americana and rock, giving the production an earthy quality appropriate to Hinton’s characters. Levine also handles music supervision, arrangements and orchestrations.
The songs work because they emerge from character rather than interrupting it.
There is yearning here, but not sentimentality for its own sake. The musical understands that Ponyboy and Johnny are still boys, despite being forced repeatedly into adult circumstances. Their dreams can therefore feel painfully modest: safety, friendship, possibility, another chance.
Watching with Deneen, I was struck by how effectively the production moves between the intimate and the epic. One minute the theater feels enormous; the next, the entire story seems to exist between two people trying to understand each other.
That ability to change scale is part of what makes the evening exceptional.
Broadway Awards Got This One Right
The production arrived on Broadway in 2024 and went on to receive 12 Tony Award nominations and win four, including Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical for Danya Taymor, Best Lighting Design and Best Sound Design.
Awards do not necessarily guarantee a great evening in the theater.
In this case, however, the accolades make sense.
What impressed me most was not any single technical achievement but the degree to which every department appears to be telling the same story. Direction, choreography, acting, sound, lighting and design are not competing for attention. They reinforce one another.
That unity is rare.
It is also why The Outsiders can reach audiences who may never have read Hinton’s novel, seen Coppola’s film or considered themselves Broadway enthusiasts.
The story is specific to Tulsa in 1967, but its emotional geography is borderless.
Every city has outsiders.
Every generation has young people who feel underestimated, unseen or prematurely judged.
Every society eventually has to confront the cost of deciding that some children have brighter futures than others.
“The Outsiders is raw without becoming cynical, emotional without becoming manipulative and spectacular without allowing spectacle to swallow the story.” — Sir Michael Fomkin, The Miami News
The Miami News Verdict: 10/10
Walking out of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre with Deneen, what stayed with me wasn’t simply the scale of the production.
It was its heart.
For all the remarkable staging and physical intensity, The Outsiders ultimately asks audiences to remember something uncomplicated: behind labels like rich and poor, Greaser and Soc, winner and loser, are human beings desperate to be understood.
S.E. Hinton wrote her novel as a teenager. Decades later, that youthful clarity remains its secret weapon. The Broadway production has preserved it while building something thrillingly theatrical around it.
The Outsiders is raw without becoming cynical, emotional without becoming manipulative and spectacular without allowing spectacle to swallow the story.
There are nights on Broadway when you leave impressed by what theater can do.
Then there are nights when you leave reminded of why theater matters.
For Deneen and me, The Outsiders was the latter.
The Miami News rating: ★★★★★ — 10/10.
The Miami News | Quick Take
- Production: The Outsiders
- Theatre: Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, 242 West 45th Street, New York City
- Based on: S.E. Hinton’s novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s motion picture
- Director: Danya Taymor
- Book: Adam Rapp with Justin Levine
- Music & Lyrics: Jamestown Revival and Justin Levine
- Choreography: Rick and Jeff Kuperman
- Broadway honors: Four 2024 Tony Awards from 12 nominations, including Best Musical
- Sir Michael Fomkin’s verdict: 10/10 — Essential Broadway
Also from The Miami News: Broadway Finds New Energy as Audiences Return to Live Theater · They Never Lost Me — A Night at The Lost Boys on Broadway
Photographs by Sir Michael Fomkin at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.
