Fifty-nine years ago a 16-year-old girl named Susie Hinton He wrote a novel about ordinary classroom-segregated kids in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that countless other teenagers would read in their own high school classes. In 1983, Francis Ford Coppola adapted this book. to a movie. A musical adaptation in 2023 Premiered at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, then transferred to Broadway and won the Tony Award for best musical a year later.
“The Outsiders” opened Wednesday in Los Angeles with bright lights and big emotions at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Earlier that evening, at the Aster Hotel around the corner, Angelina Jolie and Octavia Spencer co-hosted a fundraiser known as the show’s education initiative. Golden Kal Project, And City Year Increasing young people’s access to live theatre. (Stay Gold reached over 8,600 students and educators in more than 100 schools.)
Jolie is one of the producers of the musical. He signed on after his daughter Vivienne, then 14, brought him to the La Jolla Theater for the first time. “I was watching it and remembering my experience with this story and what it meant to me,” Jolie said, starting to choke up. “But I was watching heand I was learning this heand I realized what she saw when she saw it and what made her tick, and I was discovering my daughter.
Spencer, who sat on a plaid couch next to Jolie onstage before the event, is a City Year board member. With his participation mentoring program for years and advocated for education throughout his career.
“My job as a player is to listen,” Spencer said. “And I realize that’s true of everything in life. Most importantly, through our work with City Year, listening and monitoring our AmeriCorps members and how they work with students. I think it’s important that we don’t assume we know what students need; we ask and we listen.”
From left to right: Bill Thompson, Nycoi Jones, Jim Balfanz, Emily Baeza, Pierce Cedillo, Octavia Spencer, Angelina Jolie, Saniya Parray and Hank Unger. The yellow and red jackets are AmeriCorps members serving in the Los Angeles City Year for the second year.
(Chelsea Lauren / Outsiders)
City Year — national education and youth partner of the Stay Gold Project — Works with AmeriCorps members. They serve as teachers and mentors to students in under-resourced schools, providing support (both academic and interpersonal) and after-school programming.
“I didn’t have this program; I would have loved it,” Jolie said. Instead, “it made people make me feel like I wasn’t smart because I was a little wild or a little difficult. So maybe I was one of them, too.” them children. I couldn’t be the smart one. I couldn’t be the one organizing and directing. Maybe I’ll be the crazy artist or wild one out there.”
But there was Jolie’s mother, Marcheline Bertrand. Bertrand, also an actor (he worked with Lee Strasberg), loved theatre. He would take Jolie to the theater and talk to her about it; It wasn’t much different from Jolie’s relationship with Vivienne. Spencer, on the other hand, talked about educators who helped him recognize his own voice: his first-grade teacher (“I should have had them in his formative years!”); Miss Holly, seventh grade teacher; and his high school guidance counselor.
AmeriCorps members who work with City Year also help fulfill mentoring roles. “I was 23, just out of college,” said Emily Baeza, a City Year graduate who now works in the film industry. “I thought mentorship came with a lot of nobility. … And I quickly learned that nobility has little to do with it. It comes down to it. It’s consistency. Waking up at 5:30 a.m. every day, showing up in our yellow jackets.”
These yellow jackets flew around the room like bees before the event, mingling with fundraiser attendees and well-known actors to explain exactly what City Year does. Baeza, on the other hand, worked for two years at a high school in Boyle Heights. Now whenever he crosses the Sixth Street Bridge, he thinks of early morning burrito stands and greeting students arriving at school.
He still thinks about Ruben, one of his students who returned when he graduated from high school. At 14, he was told — like Jolie and the marauders in “The Outsiders” — that he didn’t have what it took, that he was a bad kid. “Stories shape our reality,” Baez said. “The stories we tell ourselves about what has happened to us and what we have experienced really shape how we see the world, and the same goes for our students.”
The creators and actors of “The Outsiders” in a speaking session after the first night of the Los Angeles race. From left to right, Tyler Jordan Wesley, Emma Hearn, Bonale Fambrini, Jaydon Nget, Jordan DeAndre Williams, Matthew Rego, Adam Rapp and Zach Chance.
(Chelsea Lauren)
Later that evening — past the stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and inside the Art Deco Pantages Theater — 35 City Year students, ages 12 to 14, all from Pio Pico Middle School, also had the opportunity to watch “The Outsiders.” They were interspersed with members of the press, season ticket holders and stars like Topher Grace, Ashley Park and Daniel Dae Kim.
“He looked like someone dead. I thought this was crazy! said 13-year-old Boima Clarke (whose character, “Soc,” was talking about Bob’s death with flashing lights and echoing sound effects.) “I was thinking about how they make these plays and their dedication.”
This was Clarke’s first game, and she wants to see another one, as does her friend, 12-year-old Aleyda Hernandez. (His first live arts performance was “The Nutcracker,” which he saw at a different middle school last year.) Clarke would give “The Outsiders” four and a half stars. Hernandez would give it four.
“Long after every building has collapsed or Mother Nature has reclaimed this planet, there will be things to keep us entertained…stories we will tell each other,” Spencer said. “And that’s what we need to continue to encourage. That’s why storytelling is important and also gives you ownership of your story. Never pass the pen to someone else and let them write your story.”