“‘Outsiders’ is the first novel I ever read, front to back,” Boone said. He was in fifth grade, and it had an immediate impact. “It was the first time I saw that white people could treat other white people the way who treated me as black,” he said.
Boone and the rest of the cast are more excited than nervous about the prospect of transforming this beloved property into a new medium.
“Since 1967, people who have read this novel have invested their souls and their time to step into Ponyboy’s shoes, reading the narrator as themselves,” Grant said. “It just makes me really want to not let these people down.” (Boone, who has been on Broadway before and serves as a kind of captain for his younger castmates, had bigger ambitions. “I want to break the world with this show,” he said.)
They are devotedly devoted. Jason Schmidt, who played Sodapop, the charismatic middle brother Curtis, in La Jolla and is reprising it on Broadway, got a vintage Coke bottle tattooed on his forearm, with his character’s name underneath. “I tend to be a bit more of a thinker,” he said. “It reminds me to be relaxed.”
An inspiring force
Over Italian food with Hinton, the cast teased her with questions about her teenage life (who was she dating? Michael Landon, around “Bonanza,” she said, drawing blank stares), the real Greasers and Socs in her trajectory (he knew the guy, he said, but he didn’t base the characters on anyone) and was working with Coppola, with whom he went on to adapt another of her books, “Rumble Fish.” In a red blazer and with a sly, soft-spoken spirit, she was an unlikely seven-day influence, the 20-somethings (and Pittman) hanging on her every word.
