Stay Gold in Hollywood, Angelina Jolie Toasts The Outsiders at the Pantages

*LOS ANGELES.* Before the rain started falling inside the Pantages, Angelina Jolie sat on a plaid couch at the Aster, a hotel around the corner from the theater, with Octavia Spencer beside her. Around them, AmeriCorps members in yellow jackets moved through a room of donors and actors. Later, Jolie talked about how a musical helped her discover her own daughter.

It was opening week for The Outsiders, the 2024 Tony winner for best musical, which is having its Los Angeles premiere at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre through October 18. Jolie is one of the show’s producers. She and Spencer co-hosted a fundraiser for something bigger than a single engagement, a national push to make sure students never pay to see the show.

A Free Ticket Into Tulsa

The producers announced a new partnership between the musical’s Stay Gold Project and City Year, the national nonprofit whose AmeriCorps members work in schools as tutors and mentors, Broadway News reported. Jolie and Spencer, a City Year Los Angeles board member, unveiled it at an event celebrating the musical’s Los Angeles opening.

The deal expands the Stay Gold Project nationwide through the fall of 2027. Private donations and the Crimson Lion/Lavine Family Foundation, now the program’s principal sponsor with a matching challenge grant, will underwrite the entire price of tickets, so students and educators never pay to attend, according to Broadway News. City Year will supply study guides and organize post-show conversations with company members. Donations can support students in any city where the show plays, including the 29 cities where City Year works. Broadway News put City Year’s reach at 247 schools serving 188,000 students, while BroadwayWorld said 250 schools.

“Every young person deserves the chance to experience live theater and to see something of themselves in the stories we tell,” Matthew Rego of the Araca Group, the show’s lead producer on Broadway and on tour, said in a statement.

The project started small. It underwrote Broadway tickets for New York City public school students and educators, then went national with the tour. In the tour’s first year, support from the SONIC Foundation and private donors paid for about 4,000 subsidized tickets, BroadwayWorld reported. The Los Angeles Times counts more than 8,600 students and educators reached so far, across more than 100 schools.

Later that evening, the Times reported, a group of City Year students from Pio Pico Middle School watched the show from seats sprinkled among the press, season ticket holders and famous faces including Topher Grace, Ashley Park and Daniel Dae Kim.

A Mother, a Daughter and a Novel

The story behind the show is already a piece of American adolescence. S.E. Hinton was 16 when she wrote her 1967 novel about two gangs divided by class in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the poor Greasers and the privileged Socs. Francis Ford Coppola turned it into a film in 1983. The musical premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego in 2023, moved to Broadway and won four Tony Awards, including best musical. Danya Taymor won a Tony for directing it.

Jolie signed on as a producer after her daughter first took her to see it in La Jolla, the Times reported. Telling that story in Hollywood, she began to choke up.

“I was watching it, and I was remembering my experience with this story and what it meant to me,” Jolie said. “But I was watching her, and I was learning about her, and realizing what she was seeing when she saw it, and what was moving her, and I was discovering my daughter.”

She said she never had a program like City Year. Instead, she had people making her feel she wasn’t smart because she was a bit wild or a bit difficult. “So maybe I was one of those kids,” she said. “I couldn’t have been the intelligent one. I couldn’t have been the one that could organize or direct. Maybe I’ll be the crazy artist over there, or the wild one.”

Her mother, the actor Marcheline Bertrand, loved theater and would take her to shows and talk about them afterward, the Times noted, much the way Jolie later did with her own daughter.

Spencer, who has taken part in City Year’s mentorship program for years, framed the evening around listening. “My job as an actor is to listen,” she said. “And I realize it applies to everything in life.”

Never give someone else the pen and allow them to write your story.

That line came from Spencer, who argued that the stories people tell each other will outlast every building. “That’s why storytelling is important, and it also gives you ownership of your story,” she said.

Rain on Hollywood Boulevard

The show itself is built for a room like the Pantages, the Art Deco palace on Hollywood Boulevard where the national tour now plays eight shows a week. Its indie folk-rock score comes from Jamestown Revival, the duo of Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, with Justin Levine, who also wrote the book with the playwright Adam Rapp.

The centerpiece is the rumble, about three minutes of choreographed violence under a real downpour. The Times reported that an estimated 100 gallons of water fall during each performance, drain through the floor and are recycled for the next show. The stage is covered in synthetic rubber rather than dirt, and the cast runs the fight at a “lift call” about an hour before curtain every night. “I knew very early on I wanted all the movement to be created by the same hand, that violence and dance would interweave seamlessly throughout the piece,” Taymor told the paper.

The Times theater critic Charles McNulty found the touring ensemble uneven on opening night. He also praised the singing, the design and the choreography by the brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, and wrote that the musical performances rescue the production.

For Los Angeles, the week landed on two levels. Hollywood Boulevard got the Los Angeles premiere of a Broadway best musical with one of the most famous women in film as its public face. And the city’s own City Year chapter, with Spencer on its board, hosted the launch of a program designed to put students from city schools in the same rows as the famous faces.

If You Go

The Outsiders plays the Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Boulevard, through Sunday, October 18. Curtain is 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, and 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Tickets start at $57, according to the Times, and are sold through Broadway in Hollywood, Ticketmaster and the Pantages box office.

The show runs about two and a half hours, including one 15 minute intermission, and is recommended for ages 10 and up. The Sunday, October 18 matinee at 1 p.m. offers ASL interpretation, audio description and closed captioning. After Hollywood, the tour moves to the Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa from October 20 to November 1.