Ensemble Arts Philly and the Shubert Organization present the national tour of The Outsiders

Hinton began writing The Outsiders as a high-school student, intent on showing the wider public the complex truth of her generation. Teenagers aren’t monoliths, she correctly observed, and deserved to be treated with the same nuance as adult characters in literature.

Although the creators of this musical are all well past their youth, they capture the same sophistication in their storytelling, and the material clearly still resonates with its peer audience. The youthful opening-night crowd in Philadelphia laughed, cheered, swooned, and caught their breath with more immediacy than I’ve encountered at a touring production in years.

Powerful physical dimensions

And with good reason. For practical purposes, many tours must reduce the physical dimensions of their productions to travel to new cities every week. But The Outsiders—with abstract scenic design by the collective AMP featuring Tatiana Kahvegian and breathtaking lighting design by Brian MacDevitt—seems tailor-made for the road, achieving its power not through the lumbering prowess of its sets but how the performers use them.

A loose wheel and piece of plywood become a train, a row of movie theater seats, or a church’s cross with immediate verisimilitude. A light cue can plunge the hot Oklahoma sun into unbearable darkness. Hana Kim’s projections incisively capture the class divide in Tulsa, where train tracks separate the hardscrabble East Side from the posh West Side.

Defying stereotypes

It’s those separate and decidedly unequal worlds that Ponyboy Curtis (Nolan White), a sensitive street tough with a penchant for Charles Dickens, depicts in his diary. Living somewhat feral with his brothers Darrel (Travis Roy Rogers) and Sodapop (Corbin Drew Ross) after the deaths of their parents, Ponyboy finds himself torn between the swagger he desperately wants to imitate—a machismo that belongs to Paul Newman, his screen idol, and Dallas Winston (Tyler Jordan Wesley), leader of the Greasers—and his dreams of a wider world.

In White’s compelling and masterfully sung performance, Ponyboy is sweet and sensitive. He cares for his best friend Johnny Cade (Bonale Fambrini), the hopeless product of a violent home, and finds an emotional connection with Cherry Valence (Emma Hearn), a member of the Greasers’ rival gang, the Socs. But he’s also nobody’s fool. He stands up for what is right, even as it augurs tragedy and personal peril.

The musical’s libretto, written by Adam Rapp and Justin Levine, defies easy stereotyping; even the malevolent Socs are more than just empty villains. Depictions of the Curtis homelife are as fraught as they are moving. Rogers, in his professional debut, brings a persuasive weariness to Darrel, who sings that he finds himself “stuck between the role of a brother and a father” as he’s become the family’s de facto patriarch. White and Hearn identify the tender attraction between Ponyboy and Cherry without obscuring their class differences, and Ross makes for a richly sympathetic Sodapop—a character that others could easily render a simpleton.

Still timeless

Credit belongs to Danya Taymor for direction that makes even the tiniest gesture resonate in a large theater. Choreographers Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman should also be commended for creating sequences that stylize the violence of these characters’ existence without sanitizing it. The famous “Rumble” sequence is so arresting, and so lifelike, that applauding it feels inappropriate and tawdry.

Levine wrote the score with Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, a folk-music duo who perform under the name Jamestown Revival. It strikes the ideal balance between traditional Broadway melodies and period-specific Americana twang. “Far Away from Tulsa,” a rueful duet where Ponyboy and Johnny envision a happier life, must surely be one of the sweetest, and saddest, showtunes in recent memory.

The Outsiders remains a timeless book: in my musical theater history class last semester, nearly every hand rose when I asked how many of the students had read it in high school. The musical it spawns certainly has the strength to become timeless too.