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Montlie as David Cumming tweets

Bonus: Waselden

Trevi as canon Pony

Josh as adopted au Pony

JPC as older Pony

Act 1:

- Henry is the horniest Two-Bit ever:

- He thrusted his pelvis into the hubcap when he first entered, and then Steve, Soda, and Ace all mocked him and mimed it

- He took a handful of gravel and thrusted his pelvis into his hand & threw the gravel so it looked like he was jacking off on each beat at the start of GGAH

- He also moaned when he was grinding against Soda

- And he was just throwin that pelvis AROUND during his solo

- "Two-Bit, you got the grease?" "I might!"

- ARAMIE'S GGAH RIFF WAS DELECTABLE

- I just noticed only now that it's scripted so the audience never applauds after both RITF's

- When everyone walks into the Curtis house, Ace said "hi Darrel" and he responded "hey baby"

- Ponyboy had the most "my brothers talking to me about girls but I'm gay" look I've EVER seen during the anne margaret bit

- TWO-BIT BLEW A KISS TO MARCIA IN FATDI

- I'm not sure if he does this every show, but Brent was hunched over in the kitchen during Great Expectations, so he was resting his head on his crossed arms on the table, and it made him look so small

- Daryl plays Johnny SO WELL he goes from 16 year old kid to tough greaser in the blink of an eye

- AND HIS VOICE IS JUST SO DAMN GOOD. GOD.

- He was also playing with the gravel when he was sitting in the tire

- When Dally moved to go after Johnny's parents, Daryl put his fists up like he was gonna fight him off

- When Bob tosses his flask to Paul, Ryo rumbled it SO BAD

- JOHNNY AND PONY MOVING TO SIT WITH CHERRY AND MARCIA WAS SO FUCKING FUNNY I've seen Trevi and Sky and Brody and Sky before but Brody and Daryl??? Fucking UNMATCHED

- the way Daryl IMMEDIATELY ran to Pony after Darry hit him

- They were. um. They looked. Very caring. Towards each other. During FAFT

- Daryl sang "walking around the park" instead of "walking through the park" in Run Run Brother

- Daryl looked at the blood on his hands near the end of Run Run Brother and AUGH

- He also looked SO scared when Pony moves away from him on the "train"

Act 2

- Aramie said "why don't you ask those socs why the line got crossed" instead of "ask the socs"

- Ryo flubbed the "you should be as mad as me" line in JFT

- Johnny's head was in Ponyboy's lap before, throughout, and after Throwing in the Towel

- Aramie and Brent skipped some lines in the scene before TITT and Brent just slowly walked toward Aramie and stopped, paused, and then said a line and you could see him figuring out which line to restart with

- During Hoods Turned Heroes when Darry lifted up Ace, Milena smacked Brent's ass

- Daryl's hospital gown is a different colour than Sky's? It was like, a muted darkish pink

- At the start of the rumble, a Soc yelled either "GET THE FUCK OFF" or "GET THE FUCK UP" to Two-Bit or maybe it was Soda? They were downstage left and I was back house left I couldn't see much)

- God the way Soda held Pony after Johnny dies...

- Some water from the rumble got in Aramie's mic during Little Brother and it made him sound all hollow and far away and it was really cool! He eventually tapped his mic and the water fell off but it was a really interesting effect while it lasted

- There was a BIG ass crash backstage when Cherry visits the Curtises before the finale (I think. It was somewhere around there)

There's probably some other things I forgot/missed BUT IT WAS SOOO GOOD Y'ALL and a Ponyboy cosplayer in the first row got the book tonight!!!

Oh also at stage door Renni complimented my hair and my outfit (and then he said, and I quote: "the fit is fitting!!") & said more people should dress up like I do when they see theatre, and later when he waved from his dressing room window he pointed at me and I don't think I'm ever gonna recover from that actually

And The Board!:

I know it was never Hinton’s INTENTION for any of her characters to be perceived as queer, she claims she didn’t write them that way, and that’s fine. In fact, I think reading The Outsiders as a group of straight men who have the bonds they do is actually a really great critique of toxic masculinity, in that we would see the contrast between their interactions one on one or alone with the group, compared to their macho, hyper masculine personas they showcase in public. HOWEVER, I think it’s incredibly hard to read it that way because Hinton accidentally and completely unintentionally made Darry Curtis one of the gayest characters in modern literature. It’s not far fetched. It’s not a stretch. I’m saying that if you have even a surface level understanding of subtext that it is obvious. Darry’s queerness is as open  in the novel as he is in his life- that is, it’s never said explicitly, but it’s VERY easy to see the signs. In fact, the way it’s threaded into the narrative but very talked around leads me to believe that even though Darry wasn’t out, it might have been an open secret within the gang- or at the very least they probably had some suspicions. 

For one, in the book Darry is never mentioned even once to have had a girlfriend, or even to have gone on dates, but we know he was popular and well liked. You can’t convince me that a handsome, popular football player, whose peers liked him enough to vote him Boy of The Year, didn’t have more than a few girls interested in him, but Pony’s narration never even alludes to Darry having been interested in one. For all he talks up Darry’s achievements, the scholarship he won, the future he could have had and everything he gave up, women/a girlfriend were never a part of it- which, given the time period and Darry’s reliance on hyper masculine social scripts, seems highly uncharacteristic unless there was a plausible explanation for his complete disinterest (ie. being gay). Now, examine this hyper masculinity a little further, and you can see it for what it is, a) a defence mechanism (because it separates him from stereotypes of what a gay men are like, so if he’s ‘manly’ enough no one will ever suspect or discover what he is) and b) the unfortunate complete opposite of that. Just like how hyper femininity characteristic to femme lesbians is off putting to men, the same is true to some degree about hyper masculine men being somewhat off putting to women. Not to the same degree, and probably not as obviously, but Darry’s  over the top masculinity might be the one thing effective in keeping (some) women away for reasons they can’t quite put their finger on. Point is, Darry was never a ladies man, to a degree that is very not heterosexual, especially for the time period.

So, now that we’ve established Darry’s complete disinterest in dating women,  his hypermasculine personality and it’s possible implications, let’s turn to other textual support for his queerness: his relationships with other male characters. I’m not talking about the gang- his interactions with all of them are very friendly/familial-  but he has a bond with Tim Shepard that is clear on the page but left largely unexplained (their weird eye contact and high mutual respect, the fact Tim was at their house once with no explanation), and his homoerotic run in/fight with Paul at the rumble. Both these relationships have plausible deniability- they’re not explicitly gay, but they’re also not NOT gay. Again, Hinton didn’t intentionally make Darry gay, but he very much is, and as far as closeted gay characters go, he’s a fairly well written one, because the subtext is very much THERE if you know what you’re looking for, but the queerness of his interactions is shrouded in this very real this COULD mean nothing characteristic of a lot of closeted queer interactions. 

Having said all this, I think the musical making Darry and Paul’s fight (somehow) even more charged and homoerotic than it is in the book was a wise choice, because a lot of the rest of the subtext was changed/missing from the musical adaptation. I’ve seen the ritfr analysis looking at the lyrics as they relate to Darry’s queerness, and I do think they follow the veiled/subtextual theme, but I don’t think they’re as explicitly gay as they’re touted to be. However, I do think the musical does a good job of highlighting Darry’s queerness given the medium they’re working with, and the actors do an amazing job portraying it without saying it outright, making it more obvious than it is on the page- but Darry was canonically gay in the book too, and let’s not pretend otherwise.