Daily Times

No one sings during the rumble scene in “The Outsiders,” a new musical at La Jolla Playhouse adapted from SE Hinton’s 1967 novel of teenage alienation and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film version.

The nine-person orchestra – guitar, bass, drums, keyboard, some mournful strings – stays silent, too. Instead, young bodies, about 20 of them, supply their own percussive music, falling to the cork-covered floor, groaning into their mikes, as stage rain soaks them through.

This violence is for show, of course. Those kicks and punches don’t actually connect. But the brawl, at least at first, is not aestheticised. It’s a fistfight, not a dance – brutal, futile, wet, raw and sad.

“The Outsiders,” despite its considerable appeal, can’t yet bear too much reality. Awkward, yearning, fast on its feet, the show, like the adolescents it describes, is still trying on various identities. Directed by Danya Taymor from a book by Adam Rapp, with gorgeous, mournful music and lyrics from Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, of Jamestown Revival and Justin Levine, this La Jolla version is a musical with growing pains, currently serving too many characters, too many themes, too many styles. But when it reaches its full height, it might really be something to see.

Largely faithful to the book and for better or worse, to the film, which a New York Times critic once witheringly described as “a laughably earnest attempt to impose heroic attitudes on some nice, small characters,” the show is set in 1967 Tulsa, Okla. Amid an environment of vacant lots and broken-down cars, it maps the increasingly bloody conflict between the Greasers, the East side have-nots who inspire the title and the Socs, short for “socialites,” the West side haves. In the book and the movie, both gangs are white and all male. Here the Greasers have been effortlessly yet thoughtfully diversified. There is at least one other significant departure, involving the death of a beloved character, but this, too, is purposeful and apt.

The overarching concern of “The Outsiders” are the ways in which these teenagers, largely abandoned by their elders, misunderstand the world and one another. At the febrile center of the story is Ponyboy Curtis, an orphaned 14-year-old who lives with his older brothers, Sodapop and Darrel, both of whom have left school to support him.

A sweet kid with a poet’s soul, Ponyboy stays up late reading Charles Dickens and glories in sunsets. “Robert Frost is quite talented,” he tells Cherry Valance, the Soc goddess he meets at a drive-in. But when a phalanx of drunken Socs attack him and his best friend, Johnny Cade, Ponyboy finds himself enmeshed in the local violence.

The great allure of the book and now the musical, are the big feelings that it illustrates and invites. Hinton wrote the book while still in high school and maybe because she was a woman, she articulated for her male characters rich and ardent emotional lives, which fuel the musical’s plaintive score. Though “The Outsiders” – in every form – argues that it is often easier to hate than to love and understand, it does not hesitate to show the passionate relationships among the Greasers.

The show makes a few correctable missteps. An opening number, directly referencing the opening lines of the book and with projections by Tal Yarden, focuses on Paul Newman in “Cool Hand Luke,” an odd distraction when we haven’t yet met the principal characters. Only in the third number, “Grease Got a Hold on You,” does the story’s engine finally catch. There’s also an incidence of hand-holding, pushing a platonic friendship toward the romantic, that feels strained, especially given Hinton’s stalwart displacement of sexuality. A climactic scene involving a fire is not yet convincingly staged.

There are trickier hitches, too. This is Ponyboy’s story, yet he is hardly its most compelling character. And despite Grant’s earnest, lush-voiced performance, the eye moves inexorably toward other figures, like Vasquez’s Darrel and Patterson’s Cherry and Lakota-Lynch’s Johnny and especially Da’Von T Moody’s Dallas, a muscled hood with a gangster’s pose and a big, wounded heart beneath it, who can twirl a baseball bat like a majorette’s baton.

Though Taymor, aided by the design team and the choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, manages some striking and playful images, the relationship between the real and the symbolic remains uneasy. And “The Outsiders” sometimes throttles its own exuberance. Taymor hasn’t yet worked out how to offer a work that feels dangerous and true without flattening the pleasures that a musical can provide. If “The Outsiders” means to steer its muscle cars toward Broadway, which it should, further development will almost certainly smooth these variances in focus and approach. Even now, such discord has a way of receding when the youthful, gifted performers are freed to do what they do best: to move and to sing.

Musically, the score is polyglot, borrowing confidently from folk, bluegrass and rockabilly traditions, with occasional gestures toward soul and Broadway balladry. This is a story about conflict, internal and external, but it also allows, in songs such as “Great Expectations” and “Stay Gold,” for luxuriant and surprising concordance. For the hopeless, for the loveless, for the misunderstood, which is all of us, Greaser and Soc, young and old, “The Outsiders” offers the promise of harmony.