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‘The Outsiders’ Director Danya Taymor on Making a Gritty, Violent Broadway Musical: ‘This All Needs to Take Place in the Dirt’
'The Outsiders' director Danya Taymor on adapting S.E. Hinton's novel into a gritty musical and working with Angelina Jolie.
That’s a consequence of the Broadway musical’s sandy stage, which finds the actors who bring the the gritty coming-of-age story to life each night, fighting, dancing and falling in love in the gravel. Her book follows Ponyboy Curtis, a soulful teenager who is also the member of the “Greasers,” a blue collar gang locked in a forever war with the middle-class “Socs.” But what made Hinton’s writing so totemic for generations of Americans is the way she channeled the emotional tempest of adolescence, capturing the promise of first love, the persistent feelings of being misunderstood, and the desperation to break free that so often characterize that stage of life. Taymor finally got around to reading the book, but one thing she decided to avoid was watching Francis Ford Coppola’s beloved 1983 film adaptation of Hinton’s story, the one that featured a cast of up-and-comers like Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Matt Dillon and Ralph Macchio.
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