Jesse
Green

April 11, 2024

It’s a strange paradox of Broadway that its bigness, when used humbly, can honor quite delicate ideas. Whether it can sustain them is another story. In “The Outsiders,” they are not sustained; the structural problems mean its achievements don’t stick. But they’re still achievements, and a show need not be for the ages to be for the moment. In that sense it’s fair, citing Frost, to call it golden — nature’s “hardest hue to hold.”

Brittani
Samuel

April 12, 2024

Despite picture-perfect staging and a passionate cast of triple threats, “The Outsiders” coasts only on Golden-Age appeals — its traditional structure, its beautiful, big-feeling people and its aimless wanderlust.

Sara
Holdren

April 11, 2024

Chance, Clay, and Levine can, and if The Outsiders sometimes traffics, perhaps unavoidably, in cliché, it makes up for it with the tenderness and muscle of not just its songs but its staging and performances.

Adam
Feldman

April 11, 2024

I suspect that a lot of people will like The Outsiders more than I did. But to me, its approach misses the central thrust of Hinton’s story.

Johnny
Oleksinski

April 11, 2024

The song turns out to be representative of the entire shattering-yet-optimistic musical it’s part of. Driven by authenticity, earnestness, youth and ample heart, “The Outsiders” is very much an outsider itself.

Zachary
Stewart

April 11, 2024

Kobi
Kassal

April 11, 2024

But that’s what happens when you have all the right ingredients to deliver what is perhaps the best new musical of this decade.

Greg
Evans

April 11, 2024

While all the production’s elements seem to be in place — the cast, even when its acting chops falter, is, musically, a full-throated and easy-to-like ensemble — The Outsiders often feels like a musical that wants to hang with the grown-ups while unable to leave behind its adolescent earnestness and self-involvement.

Robert
Hofler

April 11, 2024

Levine has the good taste to keep the current trend of loud anthem-itis out of “The Outsiders,” which achieves its best musical moments by serving up several still, quiet and understated tunes.

Matt
Windman

April 11, 2024

However, the book (by playwright Adam Rapp and Justine Levine), which stays dutifully true to the novel, has difficulty reconciling bursts of excitement with the plotting and character details of the novel, with Brody Grant (who looks far too mature to be playing the sensitive 14-year-old Ponyboy Curtis) slowly narrating exposition to the audience and sentimental solos that stop the show in its tracks. By act two, the show felt like a mechanical procession of plot progression and teen melodrama.

Entertainment Weekly

Emlyn
Travis

April 11, 2024

Now, The Outsiders has been crafted into a glittering musical that might not hit as hard as its predecessors, but still has the power to inspire an entire generation of young theatergoers just the same.

New York Daily News

Chris
Jones

April 11, 2024

This new Broadway musical is not all I had hoped. The show loses its narrative thread in a second act where the requisite narrative tension dissipates instead of intensifying, and the show, which lacks the humor of the structurally similar “Newsies,” gets stuck in an overly introspective and melancholic loop. It’s understandable why — the source novel is proudly reflective and ruminative, but musicals invariably have to be fueled by action, emotional change and resolvable determination.

Wall Street Journal

Charles
Isherwood

April 11, 2024

Under the fluent direction of Danya Taymor, the young cast is sensational, engulfing the theater with emotional heat and an authentic-feeling sense of passionate loyalty to one another, primarily among those playing the greasers who are the focus of the story.

New York Theatre Guide

Joe
Dziemianowicz

April 11, 2024

Despite its flaws, The Outsiders is ready to rumble.