“'Outsiders' is the first novel I read, cover to cover,” Boone said. I was in fifth grade and it made an immediate impact. “It was the first time I witnessed that white people could treat other white people the same way they treated me as a black person,” he said.
Boone and the rest of the ensemble are more energized than nervous at the prospect of transforming this beloved property into a new medium.
“Since 1967, people who have read this novel have invested their souls and time in stepping into Ponyboy's shoes, reading the narrator as themselves,” Grant said. “It just makes me want to not let those people down.” (Boone, who has been on Broadway before and serves as a sort of ringleader for his younger castmates, had bigger ambitions. “I want to break the world with this show,” he said.)
They are palpably dedicated. Jason Schmidt, who played Sodapop, Curtis' charismatic middle brother, in La Jolla and reprises him on Broadway, got a tattoo of an old-looking cola bottle on his forearm, with his character's name. under the. “I tend to be a little more of a thinker,” he said. “It reminds me to stay relaxed.”
An inspiring force
While eating Italian food with Hinton, the actors peppered her with questions about her teenage life (who was she in love with? Michael Landon, circa “Bonanza,” she said, drawing blank stares), the real-life Greasers and Socs in she. orbit (she knew the type, she said, but didn't base the characters on anyone), and working with Coppola, with whom she later adapted another of her books, “Rumbling fish.” With a red jacket and a sly, soft-spoken wit, she was an unlikely septuagenarian influencer, the 20-something guys (and Pittman) hanging on her every word.
