Notes from the Wings/Producer
Inside The Outsiders: From Tulsa to Tony Award
How a 1967 coming-of-age novel about teenage greasers in Tulsa became the 2024 Tony Award winner for Best Musical.
S.E. Hinton wrote The Outsiders when she was sixteen years old. Six decades later, the story of Ponyboy Curtis and his found family of greasers became one of the most acclaimed new musicals on Broadway, winning the 2024 Tony Award for Best Musical.
Producing The Outsiders meant honoring a story that several generations of readers had grown up loving, while finding a theatrical language strong enough to do it justice. That tension, between fidelity to a beloved source and the demands of live theatre, is at the center of almost every adaptation I've worked on through In Fine Company.
Why this story, why now
Every production starts with the same question: why does this story need to exist on a stage, right now, for this audience? The Outsiders answered that question for me immediately. It's a story about class, identity, and the families we choose, themes that have only become more relevant since 1967, not less. Teenagers today are navigating the same questions of belonging that Ponyboy and the Greasers faced, even if the specifics have changed.
From page to stage
Adapting a beloved novel comes with real risk. Readers have lived inside their own version of the story for decades. Get the tone wrong, and you alienate the people who love it most. Play it too safe, and you give audiences nothing they couldn't get from rereading the book.
The creative team built a production that trusted the emotional core of Hinton's novel while finding theatrical moments, particularly in the staging of the rumble scenes and the relationships between the Greasers, that could only exist on stage. That's the standard I hold every adaptation to: it has to earn its place as a piece of theatre, not just a faithful retelling.
Every adaptation has to earn its place as a piece of theatre, not just a faithful retelling.
Sue Gilad
What It Takes to Bring a Beloved Book to Broadway
- 01
Secure the right creative team
The book's themes need collaborators who understand them on a personal level, not just a professional one.
- 02
Protect the emotional truth, not just the plot
Audiences forgive plot compression. They don't forgive a production that loses the feeling of the original.
- 03
Find what only theatre can do
A stage adaptation has to offer something a film or a book cannot: live presence, physical staging, the immediacy of bodies in space.
- 04
Trust the workshop process
Readings and out-of-town tryouts exist to surface what isn't working before it reaches Broadway audiences. Use them honestly.
Recognition
The Outsiders won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Musical, a recognition that reflected not just the production's craft but the audience response it generated night after night. It remains one of the productions I'm proudest to have brought to the stage through In Fine Company.
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