NEW YORK, NY.- In denim and leather and newly acquired vintage snakeskin boots, the cast and creative team bringing “The Outsiders” to Broadway went on a trip across Tulsa, Oklahoma, last month — a granular, history-flecked tour of the place where, about 60 years earlier, S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age story was written and set. Hinton, 75 and still a beloved local, was a star attraction; the visit was a way of mapping out how the new musical version might fit into, or even build on, the durable legacy of “The Outsiders.”

Bouncing along together in a van, singing bits of the show’s score, the company members let out a collective gasp as they caught sight of the enormous Admiral Twin Drive-In. Hinton watched double features there as a kid, and it figured prominently in her 1967 novel. The theater, whose midcentury-style signage remains, also served as a location for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 movie adaptation, whose stars included Tom Cruise, Rob Lowe and Patrick Swayze.

“Yo, there’s a plaque back here,” someone shouted, and seven guys plus one young woman raced across the muddy offseason field to giddily read about when Greasers and Socials ruled that very spot. Then they popped behind the concessions stand and pretended to pull sodas at the counter. “The Outsiders” still sells out weekends at the Admiral, with more than 1,200 cars lining up.

It’s a Tulsa landmark, but the book is more than that. A staple of school curricula, “The Outsiders” is among the bestselling young adult novels of all time, and has doubled in popularity in the last 20 years, with over 300,000 books now purchased annually in print alone, according to Circana BookScan. Its arrival upended conventions for young readers, whose fervor for realism made mature themes marketable.

For more than a half-century, “The Outsiders” has withstood seismic shifts in youth culture, and remains seminal for generations, especially boys and men, as people reveal to Hinton all the time. “They say, ‘Your book changed my life,’” she told us, in the library of the very high school where, as a nascent teenage author, she carried her typed draft around in a three-ring binder.

More than a few of those changed people convened for the Broadway production of “The Outsiders,” which is set to start previews March 16, the latest retro touchstone to be adapted into a musical. The show’s aim is to feel unfiltered, not slick: no choreographed dance-offs between rival gangs, just tenderness and rage.

As befits, perhaps, a story of reckless youth, the production has taken some risks, including that almost none of its top-line creative team have ever made a musical. That includes Adam Rapp, a dark bard of downtown theater, and an unlikely choice to write the show’s book — because, until this, he admitted, “I never really liked musicals.”

Many of the cast members, most of them in their 20s, are making their Broadway debuts, as is their lead producer, Angelina Jolie, in her first foray into theater.

Jolie said that she and the show’s director, Danya Taymor, were among the team members pushing to take the Tulsa journey before final rehearsals. “To be there, and with S.E. Hinton,” she wrote in an email, “was deeply moving and grounded the whole production.”

As for her involvement with the show, Jolie credits her 15-year-old daughter, Vivienne, who saw it multiple times during its premiere last year at La Jolla Playhouse in California. On closing night, Vivienne took her mom, and in Tulsa, they visited with Hinton. Her daughter, Jolie noted, is the same age Hinton was when she was writing “The Outsiders.” “To think of all she was feeling at that time, to be able to pen that book,” Jolie said.

That a 15-year-old wanted to share the experience of the show with her mother was, Taymor said, “how we hope it to be.”

‘How Dangerous It Felt’

“The Outsiders” focuses on the Curtis brothers: Ponyboy, the sensitive, not-quite-15-year-old narrator, and his older siblings, Darrel and Sodapop, all orphaned when their parents are killed in a car wreck. They band together with fellow have-not Greasers against the letter-jacketed Socials, or Socs, as Hinton calls them. There is trauma, addiction, class struggle, economic instability, violence and endless cigarettes.

“I remember how dangerous it felt reading it at like 13,” said Zach Chance, one half of the rootsy Texas duo known as Jamestown Revival, whose rich Americana score for the show swings from pop country harmonies and plaintive finger-plucked ballads to rockabilly twang.

In Tulsa, the Broadway team landed on the cover of the local paper, receiving a key to the city. They also went two-stepping and made themselves known in more character-appropriate ways, like when Brody Grant, who plays Ponyboy, got poison ivy busting through a fence into the drive-in.

Ranging through the city with them felt like an exercise in alternate-era nostalgia and earnest, bro-y bonding: On the visit to Hinton’s high school, they played basketball in the gym. Emma Pittman, who portrays Cherry Valance, the object of much male adulation, clicked off on her own, in her cowboy heels.

Everyone lapped up the Outsiders House Museum, a faithful re-creation of the bungalow the Curtis brothers shared in the movie, located in a residential neighborhood whistling distance from the train tracks.

In his character’s bedroom, Grant deposited a handsome copy of “Great Expectations,” a Ponyboy favorite, which he inscribed with his recollection of reading “The Outsiders” as a school kid. “Stay gold,” wrote Sky Lakota-Lynch (the troubled, victimized Johnny Cade) invoking the “Outsiders” tagline lifted from a Robert Frost poem.

Taymor, fresh off directing her acclaimed Broadway production of the play “Pass Over,” made sure that — unlike “The Outsiders” movie — the Broadway cast is diverse, at least when it comes to the Greasers. Lakota-Lynch has Native American heritage. Joshua Boone plays Dallas Winston, an older, out-of-town miscreant (Matt Dillon in the movie); he may be a bad influence, but he’s also a caretaker.

“‘Outsiders’ is the first novel I read, front to back,” Boone said. He was in fifth grade, and it made an immediate impact. “It was the first time I witnessed that white people could treat other white people the way that I was treated as a Black person,” he said.

Boone and the rest of the ensemble are more energized than nervous by the prospect of transforming this adored property into a new medium.

“Since 1967, people who have read this novel have invested their souls and their time into putting on the shoes of Ponyboy, reading the narrator as themselves,” Grant said. “It just makes me really want to not let those people down.” (Boone, who’s been on Broadway before, and serves as a kind of ringleader for his younger castmates, had grander ambitions. “I want to break the world with this show,” he said.)

They are palpably dedicated. Jason Schmidt, who played Sodapop, the charismatic middle Curtis brother, in La Jolla and reprises it on Broadway, got a tattoo of a vintage-looking cola bottle on his forearm, with his character’s name underneath. “I tend to be a little bit more of a thinker,” he said. “It reminds me to be loose.”

An Inspiring Force

Over Italian food with Hinton, the actors peppered her with questions about her teenage life (who did she have a crush on? Michael Landon, circa “Bonanza,” she said, drawing blank stares), the real-life Greasers and Socs in her orbit (she knew the type, she said, but didn’t base the characters on anyone), and working with Coppola, with whom she went on to adapt another of her books, “Rumble Fish.” In a red blazer and with a sly, soft-spoken wit, she was an unlikely septuagenarian influencer, the 20-something dudes (and Pittman) hanging on her every word.

Jolie perched at another table at the restaurant. An owner hurriedly put up curtains over the windows to shield her from view, but the cast approached her with ease. She is an involved producer, attending workshops and hosting star-filled get-togethers for the production at Atelier Jolie, her boutique in downtown Manhattan. “She sees the edge in what we’re trying to do,” Taymor said. “She’s fearless, and she makes me feel like I can really go there.”

After lunch, it was the creative team’s turn to have an audience with Hinton, and they were possibly even more in awe. They sat in a semicircle around her in the library of her high school, a landmark 1930s art deco building that hasn’t changed much since Greasers sneaked in the back entrance — closer to the smoker’s alley — when she was part of the graduating class of 1966.

She remains an inspiring force there: “If Susie can do it, we can do it,” as one school official said. Hinton’s given name is Susan; “The Outsiders” was published, when she was a college freshman, with her initials, because editors thought nobody would buy a book about boys written by a young woman.

It was her sister who sent it off to an agent after their mother told them they could get their own car (a teal Camaro) if it sold. “She put the first dent in the car,” Hinton said, laughing.

Her fame grew slowly, she said, allowing her to acclimate, and the money came even slower. Now, she said, “I’m pretty rich.” (And she is still working, having recently sold an original screenplay.)

For Rapp, himself an author of many young adult novels, “The Outsiders” was a portal to literary life, the book he cracked in his dorm room that propelled him toward creative outlets. “I was this kid who didn’t want to be in military school,” he said. “And I found Ponyboy.” So he was nervous about meeting Hinton.

But she was self-deprecating. She loves it when people say her books made them into readers, but hearing that she changed their lives “scares the hell out of me,” she said, “because who am I to change anybody’s life?”

The original “Outsiders” manuscript is still in her closet, she said, with a smear of chocolate frosting on the cover.

In the library, the musical’s makers worked over their ideas. The Jamestown Revival guys, Chance and Jonathan Clay, were worried that a lyric in the theme song “Tulsa 67,” which they had recorded that day at Leon Russell’s old studio, might offend locals, because it imagines leaving Tulsa (Hinton has spent all but four years of her life there). She reassured them that it was all, rightly, part of teenage wonderings.

Clay said later that he felt fortunate they didn’t know the conventions of musical theater when they began composing: “We were going based off pure instinct as songwriters.”

‘A Song Can Slay’

Jamestown Revival’s score, written for a nine-piece band, was helped along by Justin Levine, whose credits include “Moulin Rouge!,” for which he and three others won a Tony Award for best orchestrations. Levine also collaborated with Rapp on the book. The choreography, both dancing and fighting, is by the brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman.

The idea to musicalize “The Outsiders” came from Coppola’s company, which owns the stage production rights. Fred Roos, one of the movie’s producers, thought its “authentic, universal and gritty themes” would attract theatergoers. “Susie was surprised and even a bit skeptical about my chances of getting it on as a Broadway musical,” he recalled, “but she let me run with it.”

The musical creators then had to grapple with how to dramatize the novel, much of which is told through Ponyboy’s descriptions, and Taymor called on Hinton regularly for advice. In their staging, Ponyboy breaks the fourth wall, narrating while looking out at the audience.

But why would these rough-and-tumble teenagers suddenly break into song? Levine, the musical-theater veteran, said when he was initially approached for the project, he had no idea, and “that’s what excited me.”

Rapp was even more out of his depth — despite supporting his brother Anthony Rapp’s success in “Rent” and other shows. Drafting his own musical, though, he uncovered why the characters need to vocalize.

They are often inarticulate, he said, as survivors who are searching for ways to relate. Letting them step out with a soundtrack became an echo of that universal teenage feeling: This song speaks to me, speaks for me.

“I could write a monologue that can slay the world,” Rapp said, “but a song can slay the world better.”

For Taymor, a niece of “Lion King” director Julie Taymor, musicalization also connected to Hinton’s text, which explored the boys’ fears and hopes. “The characters are so vulnerable in all these different ways. They’re really exposed,” Taymor said. “And I think that when a human being is singing, that’s also one of the most exposed feelings — any time I do it, my heart just goes wild. That really fits.”

But they decided certain parts of the show should not be sung-through, including the fighting. The rumbles, meant to be rough and visceral, do not have any “West Side Story” snap. The minimalist set design, of concrete blocks, wood planks and industrial beams, is also raw-edged, and all manipulated by the cast. The message is that these kids must build their own world, and in rehearsal actors like Lakota-Lynch played it with a knee-shaking intensity.

They did not want to aestheticize, Taymor said, the violence that “exists in the lives of young people who can’t control the barrage of it, or get swept up into it.” And they wanted to address it, Rapp added, “as bravely as it is in the book.”

But “The Outsiders” offers a route out of bleakness. After Ponyboy suffers an onslaught of trauma, “the floodgate of writing starts to come out of him,” Taymor said. The idea is that “creation can actually save you. It is a means of some salvation.”

Hinton knew it firsthand. “The year I wrote ‘The Outsiders,’ my father was dying of a brain tumor,” she recounted, back in her hometown library. “It was very slow. It was very painful. It was horrendous to watch. And I chose to write because I didn’t want to live where I was living.”

“I lived in ‘The Outsiders,’” she said. “And it was years before I made that connection.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.