On the road with 'The Outsiders', where the Greasers and Socs Rumbled

'Outsiders' is the first novel I read, cover to cover,” Boone said. He was in fifth grade and it made an immediate impact. “It was the first time I witnessed white people being able to treat other white people the way I was treated as a black person,” he said.

Boone and the rest of the ensemble are more energetic than nervous at the prospect of transforming this beloved property into a new medium.

“Since 1967, people who have read this novel have invested their souls and time into putting on Ponyboy's shoes, reading the narrator as themselves,” Grant said. “It just makes me really not want to let those people down.” (Boone, who has previously appeared on Broadway and serves as a leader of sorts for his younger castmates, had bigger ambitions. “I want to break the world with this show,” he said.)

They are palpably committed. Jason Schmidt, who played Sodapop, the charismatic middle Curtis brother, in La Jolla and reprized it on Broadway, got a tattoo of a vintage-looking Coke bottle on his forearm, with his character's name underneath. “I'm usually a little bit more of a thinker,” he said. “It reminds me to be loose.”

An inspiring force

Over Italian dinner with Hinton, the actors bombarded her with questions about her teenage life (who was she in love with? Michael Landon, circa “Bonanza,” she said with blank stares), the real Greasers and Socs in her orbit (she knew the type, she said, but based the characters on no one) and collaborated with Coppola, with whom she subsequently adapted another of her books, “Junkfish.” In a red blazer and with a sly, soft voice, she was an unlikely seventy-year-old influencer, with twenty-somethings (and Pittman) hanging on her every word.