Warring teens tug at the heart in one of the season’s best new musicals

When I first learned that the musical “The Outsiders,” which opened Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, would include a song called “Stay Gold,” I laughed.

Is not it ? The words “Stay Golden, Ponyboy,” from author S.E. Hinton’s 1967 young adult novel about Oklahoma’s warring gangs, have achieved a cultural status akin to “I’m looking at you, kid” or “I’m looking at you, kid.” I am your father “.

Made even more famous by Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film, the old phrase has been repeated so much over the decades that its meaning has mostly given way to cheesiness and eye-rolling.

And then the wonderful Sky Lakota-Lynch, as Johnny Cade, started singing it.

“Finding beauty in the herd is the only way to avoid growing old. My friend, stay gold,” says the number by Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance of the band Jamestown Revival and Justin Levine.

I wasn’t laughing anymore. Rather the opposite.

The tender melody, accompanied by an acoustic guitar, is not only the most beautiful of all the new musicals this season, it is a moment of pure catharsis that has been missing from Broadway shows of recent years.

The song turns out to be representative of the entire moving but optimistic musical of which it is a part. Driven by authenticity, seriousness, youth and a big heart, “The Outsiders” is an outsider in itself.

The enriching story primarily concerns 14-year-old Ponyboy, a member of the Greasers, a working-class gang from Tulsa, who immerses himself in literature and secretly writes fiction to escape the unrest swirling around him.

Newcomer Brody Grant, with a record deal-ready voice and grounded teenage vulnerability, makes a sublime debut in the role. It’s the kind of bookworm idol you’re more likely to find on Netflix these days than on Broadway.

But the sagacity of director Danya Taymor’s production begins with the brilliance of the casting, from top to bottom. By the end of the opening song, titled “Tulsa ’67,” we have already met and inexplicably loved every Greaser.

There’s respected leader Dallas (Joshua Boone), gentle Johnny (Lakota-Lynch), and mischievous Two-Bit (Daryl Tofa). Ponyboy’s parents died in a train accident, so he is raised by his two brothers, the stern Darrel (Brent Comer) and the clumsy Sodapop (Jason Schmidt).

The mortal enemies of this rowdy group are the Socs, the rich, letter-jacket-clad opposites on the other side of the railroad tracks. Of this pack, the musical only delves into the deeper side of Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman), a girlfriend of Soc who takes an interest in the atypically open-minded Ponyboy.

However, not trying to tackle too much turns out to be one of the main virtues of “Outsiders.”

Many readers will see songs and gangs and think, “Sharks and Jets?” And, yes, like in “West Side Story,” “The Outsiders” also has a rumble — a heart-stopping rumble, choreographed by Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman with unison thumps in a full-blown downpour.

But Pony is not Tony. This is a gentler, more intimate tale, not a grand Shakespearean love story, the painfully arbitrary tragedies that still haunt the evening news. Each in their own way, the Greasers are these poor and sensitive souls who despite themselves allow themselves to be drawn into the ugliness of society. Socs too, even if they are designed in a flatter way.

The sadness and desolation of the plot aside, there is an admirable grace in the way “The Outsiders” has been constructed.

Unlike many choppy stage adaptations of novels or films, in which a poorly written scene is little more than a means to another mercantile ballad, Adam Rapp and Levine’s focused book merges almost indistinguishably with the vibrant Great Plains-style score. One bleeds into the other.

The same goes for the staging. Taymor, by the way, is the rare director whose dramatic skills translate instantly to musical theater. She gives the spoken word sections realness and grit, then seconds later she lets her characters dance dreamily on real gravel – soft gravel that covers the stage and flies through the air while the ensemble jumps and kicks.

Tatiana Kahvegian and AMP’s set is a large garage, with an oversized tire cleverly transforming into an outdoor water well and the hood of a car becoming Ponyboy’s bed.

The show falters briefly at the start of the second act when Ponyboy and Johnny sit too far to the back of the stage in a quiet church. This is a criticism, however. Soon he is powerfully revived by the violent battle, Boone’s song, “Little Brother,” and the Lakota-Lynch heartbreak that builds into a magnificent duet with Grant.

His Ponyboy has been through hell, and Grant has impressively become the ghost of what a well-adjusted teenager should be.

But the resilient character always finds a way to “stay golden”: a phrase that, for now anyway, will make me cry – not roll.