#s.e hinton blesses us with her world building.

[vaultedoverthehorse]

“Curly, this is really dumb.” The little nine year old stood looking up at his older friend, who was attempting to climb up a telephone pole. The friend in question looked down with a confident smile.

“I’ve got this, Ponyboy. I’m halfway there already!” Curly hoisted himself up higher on the pole. This whole ordeal would’ve already been stupid, had it not rained the night before. In the early morning, the pole was slicker than it should be.

“Curly, I really think you should get down.” Always the over thinker, Pony was terrified his friend would bust his head and die if he fell. But at the same time, he was Curly Shepard, the tuff ten-year old who was already getting into fights and winning. He could get hurt.

Pony was about to be proven wrong. “C’mon, Ponybaby, don’t worry-“ Curly’s had slipped, and he couldn’t catch himself before he fell down and landed hard on the soggy grass. The dull thud made Pony slightly queasy. He just stared for a moment, completely terrified.

“Curly, are you dead?” He asked quietly, his voice squeaky.

Curly sat up, his face pale. His eyes were wide with pain, and he looked like he was trying not to cry. That’s bad, Pony thought. Shepards never cried. Was the world ending?

“I-I’m not dead,” he said quietly. Pony was even more terrified by how he was holding himself. Curly was always overconfident, risky, and excited. Now he just looked defeated. “I just - hurt my arm. It’s not a big deal, I’m - I’ve had worse.” He had not had worse. His voice sounded sad, like he was trying to convince himself of what he was saying.

Pony took a glance at his arm and instantly regretted it. Were arms supposed to bend that way? He didn’t think so. Maybe they could, he was only nine and he hadn’t seen much. But if they were supposed to bend that way, Curly wouldn’t be crying.

“Um…I’m gonna go get Darry.” That’s the only thing Pony could think of doing right now. His parents were at work, and Soda was running around with Keith and Steve. Plus, Darry plays football. He knows what to do with injuries.

Pony ran as fast as he could to the Curtis home. Luckily he’s always been a good runner, able to outrun Soda by a mile. He banged through the front door, finding a, annoyed Darry doing homework at the kitchen table.

“What, Pony?” But the sick look on his little brother’s face made his annoyance shift to concern. “What happened?”

“Curly’s arm is facing the wrong way.” Pony ranted out the whole story, barely stopping to breathe.

Darry groaned, heading for his jacket. “You kids are gonna be the death of me…Tim needs to get his brother under control.” He rubbed a hand down his face, then pointed to Pony. “You call Tim, I’ll go get the troublemaker.”

A week later, Curly walked around school, telling some tale of how he’d gotten his arm broken by three senior Socs but he managed to fight them off one-handed. Pony rolled his eyes. He would’ve been telling everyone the whole story, had Curly not let him draw something small on his cast as payment. The real story only existed between Pony, Curly, Darry, and an extremely drunk Tim. And Curly got to carry around a drawing of a horse for six weeks.

[broadway-heere-i-come]

“This opening night was a long time coming,” says Sky Lakota-Lynch, who stars as Johnny Cade in the new Broadway musical The Outsiders. “I’ve been with this show for six years, I began working on it in 2018, and it’s been such a long journey to get to this point—it’s unreal that it just finally happened!”

Six years isn’t such a long time, however, in the lifespan of the story. S.E. Hinton’s novel The Outsiders, about rival gangs of greasers (including Johnny) and rich kids in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was first published in 1967, and it was 16 years later that it was adapted to make a beloved film. Still, after years of working on the show, the cast was ready to share it with the world.

“It was a total celebration” Lakota-Lynch says of opening night. “There’s something blissful about seeing the show come to life and having audiences embrace it in such an amazing way. What more can you ask for?”

Here, Lakota-Lynch shares his opening night diary—with photos by Jenny Anderson—with T&C.

"I do have an opening night ritual: I meditate before every single show. For this character, I have to act with my energy, so it helps me to ground myself and not be worried about the outside world. Just having a moment of complete silence is so important for me."

"Shockingly, I'm not that nervous in The Outsiders. I was really nervous in Dear Evan Hansen because it was new to me and I was stepping into the role someone I was replacing. With The Outsiders, our director, Danya Taymor, builds such a comfort zone for people that cast feels like brothers and like we aren't necessarily acting every night. So, the nerves don't really come for me in The Outsiders. Honestly, I get more nervous after the show having to say hi to people than for the show itself."

"Before every show, we do circle up and one person makes a little speech, and then we all break to think about the theme of that speech, which could be freedom, peace, or love. Every single show we do this, no matter what."

"My friend and cast mate Tilly Evans-Krueger got this amazing thing called the Legacy Robe, which is a tradition in the theater. She puts it on and runs around us three times clockwise, and we all touch it for good luck, and then she visits our rooms in the robe and it blesses the show."

"I've known Brody [Grant, who plays Ponyboy] for five years. I knew Brody before he was even in the show because my understudy at Dear Evan Hansen was Brody's roommate in college. Lo and behold, here we are and Brody's one of my best friends. It's so rare that you get to work with people who you actually love, and there's not a singe person in my cast who I dread seeing."

"I got to be close with Angelina Jolie, who's our producer, because we went to Tulsa, Oklahoma together, and she asked to design my opening-night outfit. She and this amazing tattoo artist named Mark Mahoney designed the jacket and all the little patches. Next week I'm going to get a tattoo from Mark."

"This is our fight call, which lasts an hour every single day. Because the show is so physical, we have to make sure that no one gets hurt. So we get called an hour before curtain and we run through the physical numbers just to make sure that everything is set and that everyone's body is OK before we actually run it full speed during the show."

"Our stage door has been really crazy. People love The Outsiders, and the response has been wild. Every single night a crowd gathers and is screaming outside of our dressing room windows. This lady has been there every single night, and though I've been skipping the stage door because I've been so tired leading up to opening, I finally got her picture with me, which was awesome."

"Right before the curtain, before I got into my wig and makeup, Jenny was like, 'let me get one last picture of you before you go inside.' The Jacobs Theatre has this really cool indoor-outdoor alley and it connects to the Majestic and the Golden. It's historic, so we just took pictures there and it was awesome."

"After we did the show, we had an after party. There were a lot of cool people there: Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys, Jeremy O. Harris. It was very overwhelming, and I didn't stay too long. I had gotten a hotel room with my family and I was just like, you know what, I'm going to enjoy it for as long as I can and then I'm going to go home."