Mirvish’s ‘The Outsiders’ features a spectacular, Canadian-made rumble scene — too bad the songs fail to land

But the extended second-act rumble scene in the Tony Award-winning musical “The Outsiders” is so spectacularly theatrical — onstage rain! Lightning and thunder! Choreographed punches and kicks! Synchronized falls! — it earned one of the biggest ovations on the show’s opening night.

It’s a shame the other elements of this touring Broadway production — particularly the songs — fail to land with the same powerful force.

Based on S.E. Hinton’s beloved 1967 novel and the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film adaptation, “The Outsiders” tells the story of a group of working-class teens in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in the late 1960s.

Our narrator is the 14-year-old dreamer Ponyboy (Nolan White), who spends his free time watching movies and reading books. He lives with his older brothers Darrel (Travis Roy Rogers) and Sodapop (Corbin Drew Ross), whose lives are shrinking before their eyes.

Less than a year earlier, their parents died in a car accident. And so Ponyboy relies on them and his symbolic brothers in the “Greasers” — including pack leader Dallas (played by Jaydon Nget, filling in for Tyler Jordan Wesley) and best friend Johnny Cade (Bonale Fambrini) — to get by.

The Greasers, who live on Tulsa’s rougher east side, despise the “Socs” (short for members of the higher-class “social scene” in the west end), who live on the west side, and vice versa. But when Cherry (Emma Hearn), the girlfriend of head Soc Bob (Mark Doyle), connects with Ponyboy, tensions erupt between the two groups, resulting in fights, retaliations and eventually death.

Hinton’s book — which she began writing at 15 — has endured because teens will always feel like societal outsiders. In a book or movie, there’s lots of room to develop characters and suggest conflict.

Good theatre, on the other hand, has different requirements, and we can’t just be told things, we need to see them. Or, in the case of musicals, hear about them. And that’s where this musical stumbles.

The songs — by the folk duo Jamestown Revival (Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance) as well as co-book writer Justin Levine — draw from country and blues, but it’s hard to tell them apart. The lyrics don’t further the story or characters, and the book — by Levine and Adam Rapp — is often confusing.

I had such a hard time keeping track of the various Greasers that I literally wrote in my notebook: “Two-Bit wears overalls with one strap loose.” (Thank you, costume designer Sarafina Bush.)

It’s impossible not to compare this musical to “West Side Story,” another show about rival gangs but one with superior songs and more fleshed-out characters.

The actors appear sufficiently youthful to make their humble yearnings feel authentic. White makes a sympathetic narrator, even when singing an awkward song about Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations.” He has no chemistry with Hearn’s Cherry, but that’s not his fault. Rogers, Ross, Fambrini and Nget each get moments to shine.

Throughout, director Danya Taymor and her production team help enhance the thin material. The unglamorous scenography by AMP and Tatiana Kahvegian consists of a bit of scaffolding, a few old tires and big planks of wood, all of which are reconfigured to become a drive-in theatre (with room enough for a couple of model cars), a modest home and a park.

Hana S. Kim’s projection designs add lots of colour to the bleak stage picture, evoking the film “Cool Hand Luke” one moment, suggesting flames engulfing a building the next.

But the combination of Brian MacDevitt’s lighting effects, Cody Spencer’s sound design and the athletic choreography by Canadian-born siblings Brian Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman take “The Outsiders” to impressive heights.

Even before that big rumble, moments in the show come to vivid life thanks to the artful merging of these design elements. 

The direction and designs, more than the music or words, helped propel the show to its Tony Award for Best New Musical in 2024.

Just remember: as legendary composer Richard Rodgers once allegedly said, nobody ever left the theatre humming the scenery.