“In the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Outsiders,” something shocking keeps happening. It isn’t that the characters throw punches, or not exactly. These are teenagers who rumble, so it isn’t surprising that they’re violent. What’s shocking is the kinesthetic impact. You seem to feel the blows yourself.

The impact is electrifying, but it doesn’t operate alone. It serves the storytelling and engages the emotions of an audience by bodily means. This is what choreography at its best can do, and it isn’t limited to what you might think of as dancing.

The choreographers of “The Outsiders” and of the four other shows nominated for the Tony Award in that category this year understand this. None dole out the usual stuff. This broader vision of theatrical choreography is worth noticing and applauding.”

“‘The Outsiders’ Broadway review: Warring teens tug at the heart in one of the season’s best new musicals”

”And, yes, like in “West Side Story,” “The Outsiders” also has a rumble — a breathtakingly visceral one choreographed by Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman with unison jabs under a full-stage downpour.”

“Many stunning things are happening on the stage of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater — and from the sobs I heard the other night, in the audience, too.”

“The big fight that takes place toward the end of the new show “The Outsiders” ranks as one of the most impactful (literally) moments of this, or any, Broadway season.”

”...their climactic, rain-soaked rumble is punctuated only by the thumps of fists and kicks viciously hitting their targets, by grunts of rage and groans of pain. Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman’s fight and movement choreography works in symbiosis with Brian MacDevitt’s stark lighting and Cody Spencer’s imaginative sound design.

Similar inventiveness is on display throughout, albeit on a smaller scale, as when a few tires and boards are enough to make us see characters jump aboard a freight train. ”

“...has the power to inspire an entire generation of young theatergoers...”

”...brilliant staging speaks.... director Danya Taymor keeps Ponyboy and his pals moving at a swift gallop onstage, pausing only for a few slow motion fight sequences that were choreographed by brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman. The musical’s biggest brawl, the rain-soaked Rumble, is some of the most captivating stage fighting currently on Broadway...”

“All of the fight scenes and dance sequences were expertly choreographed by Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman... “The Outsiders” musical is captivating, high-octane, refreshing, and it garners five out of five stars. Bravo.”

“To my very pleasant surprise, as musical adaptations go this season, The Outsiders jumps to the head of the class.”

”Everything about this production feels original and dynamic.”

”Add to all this, thrilling dance and fight choreography under the direction of Rick and Jeff Kuperman. The brothers were happily given free rein to ply their exceptional skills. With tremendous athleticism, their dance movements are powerfully evocative. The climactic rumble between the warring gangs is an extended ballet that’s as fittingly violent as it is graceful.”

”The show appeals on so many levels. If the catchy songs, dynamite choreography and heartfelt sentiment don’t grab you, all those hunky young men displaying gobs of talent should do the trick. Injecting a healthy dose of testosterone is always hard to resist. But that’s just a bonus. The Outsiders is an emotionally and viscerally satisfying work. There is much to savor and we have a new generation of Broadway talents to thank for it. They are gold. Just hope they’re here to stay.”

“THE OUTSIDERS Finds Greatness On Broadway — Review”

”When I attended a recent performance of The Outsiders at the Jacobs Theatre on Broadway, there was a certain buzz in the air. Something we don’t always see in a Broadway house… a mass of young people eagerly awaiting the start of the show. Not since Beetlejuice or Newsies-mania back in the day have I felt the energy of young audience members rallying around a musical, especially so early in the production’s life. But that’s what happens when you have all the right ingredients to deliver what is perhaps the best new musical of this decade.”

”Rick and Jeff Kuperman’s impressive and striking choreography aids the narrative and never detracts from the moment at hand. Their much-talked about rumble late in Act II is just as astonishing as it was out in La Jolla and simply must be witnessed in person. When you pair that with intricate scenic design by AMP featuring Tatiana Kahvegian, wonderful lighting by Brian MacDevitt, fitting costume design by Sarfina Bush, and engaging sound design by Cody Spencer, it all fits perfectly.

In a historical theatrical season with more shows than even the critics can count opening, The Outsiders stands out far and wide—this revelatory new work is sure to be talked about for generations to come. And although it might be the ultimate cliche, S.E. Hinton wrote it best: The Outsiders is theatrical gold, and Ponyboy, you are gonna wanna stay with it. ”

“Luckily, the words matter less than they might have because the most outstanding aspect of this musical is the staging – by which I mean primarily the choreography. The set, design (especially the lighting by Brian MacDevitt) and special effects (rain, smoke, fire) allow for, and sometimes enhance, the movement. This encompasses not just the dancing, but the fighting, which at its most arresting, resembles not just slow-motion cinematography but stop-motion animation – performed by the human beings on stage.”

“‘The Outsiders’ review — adaptation of the classic novel rumbles with talent”

”Choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman put the show in gymnastic, muscular motion. The climactic gang war surges in such stylized, cinematic fashion that my audience actually cheered.”

“The moments from which you can’t come back – a concussion, a punch, a death – are rendered in near strobe-lit slow motion, glimpses and snippets rather than scenes... You can see, in the searing flashes of ... lights and staccato, gorgeous fight choreography by the brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman, a more modern understanding of how trauma shreds memory, of how violence obliterates all it touches.”

“Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman’s muscular choreography serves the material well...”

“Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman provide vivid fight choreography.”

“The Outsiders Review: Greasers and Socs Will Get a Hold on You in Musical Adaptation”

”Juvenile Delinquents Turn Heroes,” proclaims a newspaper headline in S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders, which was famously adapted for the screen in 1983 by Francis Ford Coppola. And the juvenile delinquents on stage at the Bernard J. Jacobs Theatre are doing the same, rescuing a Broadway season overstuffed with undercooked musicals in an unexpectedly persuasive new adaptation of Hinton’s scrappy, moving story.”

”...The Outsiders is, at last, a darn good musical.”

”And while Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins musicalized West Side Story’s deadly Rumble and re-physicalized that show’s brutality through dance, The Outsiders takes a different tack. In the musical’s two most harrowingly visceral scenes of violence, the music drops out entirely, and, while the fighting is lightly stylized by Rick and Jeff Kuperman’s choreography, it also feels queasily real. Like the Sharks and the Jets before them, The Outsiders’s Greasers and Socs glamorize and glorify themselves and their aggression, but, when those bloody confrontations detonate, this show demands that the audience see those scenes as they really are, in startling contrast to the safer surreality of the musical theater form.

It’s that kind of fully realized theatrical gesture that most distinguishes Taymor’s directorial vision, elevating The Outsiders’s well-made material to a remarkable, emotionally arresting piece of theater. And, in the musical’s final minutes, as Grant’s sorrowfully resilient Ponyboy begins to pen his own self-portrait in the face of unrelenting loss, one could almost call that kind of heart-wrenching theater-making heroic.”

“Even with its echoes of “West Side Story,” that lengthy fight, which involves a rain curtain... is among the most imaginative scenes staged by director Danya Taymor and choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman on the show’s clever industrial set...”

“Brian MacDevitt’s lighting design and Cody Spencer’s sound meld well with with the choreography, especially during a crowd-pleasing slo-mo, freeze-frame, strobe-lit rumble between the vengeance-seeking cliques.”

“The highly physical choreography, by Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman, skillfully mixes vernacular movement with dance.”

“[Ace] and her frequent counterpart, the waggish Two-Bit (Daryl Tofa), dance like devils and tumble like acrobats. They’re a vital part of the Greaser family and of the show’s high-octane choreography by the brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman. Along with director Danya Taymor, the Kupermans have built an exhilarating movement world for The Outsiders, especially in the brutal “rumble” that goes down between the Socs and the Greasers at the show’s climax. Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that The Notebook gets epically out-rained, and — working in militarily precise tandem with the flashes and crashes of Brian MacDevitt’s lights and Cody Spencer’s sound design — [Kupermans and] Taymor [create] a spectacular ballet of violence. [They’re] constantly and compellingly repurposing the basic elements of the show’s gritty warehouselike set (its old tires, boards, and jungle-gym scaffolding by Tatiana Kahvegian and the design collective AMP), and both mid-rumble and elsewhere, [they suspend] time to great effect. Moments of impact stretch into the molasses of slow-motion while frigid LEDs half-blind us; the actors’ bodies float and arc through space before smashing back into action — choreographed in tight unison at one moment, released into apparent chaos in the next. It’s a great trick: Not only does it facilitate agile leaps into Ponyboy’s frame narration — it also makes the hits land harder than they ever could under the constraints of realism.”

“Deep into the new musical The Outsiders, there is a sequence that is rawer and more pulse-pounding than anything else on Broadway right now. It’s halfway through the second act, and the simmering animosity between opposing youths in 1967 Tulsa...has come to a violent boil. The two groups square off in rumble, trading blows as rain pours from the top of the stage... The music stops, the lighting flashes, and before long it is hard to tell which figures onstage, caked in mud and blood, belong to one side or the other.

This scene succeeds for many reasons: the stark power of the staging by director Danya Taymor and choreographers Rick and Jeff Kuperman; the aptness of the confusion, which dramatizes the pointlessness of the gangs’ mutual hostility; the talent and truculent pulchritude of the performers.”

“‘The Outsiders’ Broadway Review: It Vastly Improves on Coppola’s Cult Classic

”In a musical about a bunch of rowdy teenagers, it’s right that a few wooden planks and some tractor tires function as an obstacle course that Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman’s kinetic choreography keeps throwing at the very expert and inexhaustible dance ensemble.”

“Many of us have known the young adult novel since our junior high school days, but never like this; now, you can experience a fresh original take with a steady stream of creative theatrical ingenuity.”

”Choreographers Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman avoid any easy comparisons to the musicals West Side Story and Grease and instead offer masculine, vigorous moves both in joyful celebration and in violent brawls. At one point, the fight choreography becomes affectingly synchronized, ensuring a nomination if not an outright win for a Tony Award. It is quite simply the best choreography in any new Broadway show.”

“Rick and Jeff Kuperman’s choreography is similarly evocative as these Tulsa boys kick up the Oklahoma soil (the stage is dusted with a synthetic rubber granule called EPDM, giving the impression of a dirty junkyard). From the very beginning, Danya Taymor’s production has purpose, momentum, and a strong point of view.”

”An old car on blocks remains stage left throughout, with the actors creating every other scene using tires and wooden boards, which they whip through the air with balletic grace... ”

“A stirring new musical adaptation of [...] The Outsiders [is] a dynamic, heartrending, and ultimately hopeful story [...] filled with expressive music, thrilling choreography, and empathetic performances by a breakout cast of triple threats, under the inspired direction of Danya Taymor.”

”As with Grant, every member of the featured cast and ensemble brings a youthful spirit to the show’s exciting choreography (by Rick Kuperman and Jeff Kuperman), which masterfully combines fight, dance, and acrobatics, slow-motion and stop-action movement...”

”Through its highly sensitive songs, stunning choreography, telling design, deeply moving performances, and profoundly affecting underdog perspective, with a star turn by Brody Grant, The Outsiders takes a classic of modern literature and film to new heights on Broadway, so get your tickets – and don’t forget to bring your tissues.”