"The Outsiders": A New Musical
Tulsa Performing Arts Center
October 8, 2025
If you’ve been marinating in The Lowdown these past few weeks, you’ve gotten a big dose of Tulsa scruff, sleaze, humor, and grit. Sterlin Harjo’s Tulsa jolts and smokes along a track much like the one S.E. Hinton laid down in 1967 with her novel The Outsiders, which got a second pop-cultural life with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film.
In Hinton’s Tulsa, the real insiders are “the outsiders,” the ones most beaten down by society bullshit, who, with a defiant kind of optimism, make a life for themselves inside it. The book gives us a Tulsa—a true one, it seems to me—where fate and history hang heavy, where generational trauma runs through many veins, where social striations feel immovable and territories are firmly marked. It’s also a place where chosen family can be thicker than blood, where dreams run hot but the predominant mode is the Shuffle, where art can be a lifeline out of bitter resignation.
You’ll find a lot of that Tulsa in the Broadway musical The Outsiders, which swept the Tony Awards last year and launched its North American tour in Tulsa this week, with impressive behind-the-scenes help from the PAC and Celebrity Attractions. This show was made by geographical outsiders who are industry insiders, which puts them at a double remove from the Greaser way of life. But they spent a decade building it, including a January 2024 visit to Tulsa. Along the way, as the creative team said during Wednesday’s curtain call, they developed a real affection for this place, and it shows—from the replica of the old wooden Admiral Twin Drive-In screen, to the rose-and-turquoise sunsets, to the care each excellent young actor brings to their role.
Director Danya Taymor comes to The Outsiders from an incredible run directing contemporary plays; she won another Tony this year for John Proctor Is The Villain. With a team of world-class lighting and production designers, she’s created a visual world that marries necessity with love, hard realities with soulful dreams. The stage is full of the stuff of little-city life—a rusted out car, climbable piles of tires, a kitchen table and a single lamp spilling an amber glow—and it all has a lived-with feel, like these kids have been moving these bits of steel and rubber around for years, like their elders before them.
For all the detritus on stage, what you mostly experience are the bodies of these young people, who jostle against each other and toss bits of grit from the ground up into the air, like sawdust confetti. They turn that old car into a concession stand and a bed during the course of the show. In their hands, flashlights are both bedtime reading aids and tools for very literal searching. Defined in some ways by the violence and hardship of their world, these kids are also exuberantly present in it, making a lot out of the little they have.
Realism isn’t musical theater’s strong suit, though, and real-life episodes like a gathering at the drive-in tend to feel ho-hum. When Taymor swings hard in the other direction, taking us fully, even surreally, inside Ponyboy Curtis’ first-person point of view, this production booms with something deep and true.