Jamestown Revival's Zach Chance, left, and Jonathan Clay. (Photo by Grace Herr)
The 77th annual Tony Awards took place last night, and unsuspecting TV audiences may have met a denim-clad troupe performing distinctly rootsy music on the recreation of a Broadway stage with some skepticism. But for musical theater fans, seeing the company of The Outsiders — with music co-written by country-Americana band Jamestown Revival — reconstruct a medley of “Tulsa ’67/Grease Got a Hold” was a joyful cross-medium phenomenon.
The musical, which opened on Broadway in April, is an adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film version and was co-written by theater mainstay Adam Rapp. Set in Tulsa in the 1960s, the story follows two groups of young rivals — the lower class “Greasers” and the upper class “Socs” (socialites) — as they navigate life, death, love, and tragedy throughout, and in spite of, their socioeconomic divides. On stage at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre in New York City, the production offers spectacular lighting and set design, including strobes that flash violently during the numerous fight scenes and a car that serves as an indispensable prop and remains stage-left for most of the performance.
Jamestown Revival bandmates and childhood friends Jonathan Clay and Zach Chance, who grew up together about seven hours south of Tulsa in Magnolia, Texas, offer a soundtrack perfectly fit for the musical. Throughout their most recent Jamestown Revival record, 2022’s Young Man (ND review), they blend their show-stopping harmonies with acoustic strumming and gusts of fiddle or pedal steel. To tell the story of The Outsiders, they seem to take these sounds and lean on their own personal and intimate understandings of youthful melodrama, loyalty, and dreams. Their humor, too, is as dry as the dusty Oklahoma plains, as illustrated in lyrics like “If you’re not born into money, then you’re born into despair / And they’ll do all that they can to keep your poor ass there.”
The Outsiders was nominated for 12 Tony awards this year, ultimately winning four — Best Musical, as well as Best Direction of a Musical, Best Sound Design of a Musical, and Best Lighting Design of a Musical. And despite it being their first foray into musical theater, Jamestown Revival was specifically nominated alongside music supervisor Justin Levine for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations (the awards were won by Shaina Taub for Suffs and Jonathan Tunick for Merrily We Roll Along, respectively).
No Depression checked in with Clay via email the week before the Tony Awards to learn more about Jamestown Revival’s experiences working on The Outsiders. As with our entire “In the Deep End” series, questions start easy and get progressively deeper. Answers have been edited for style and clarity.
The Outsiders is nominated for 12 Tony Awards, and your music is nominated for Best Original Score and Best Orchestrations! How does that feel, and what was it like playing the Jamestown Revival song “Young Man” on stage alongside the whole cast a couple weeks ago?
After spending the past nine years working on this musical, we still can’t believe it’s actually happening. We were shocked with the nominations. Shocked, and incredibly proud!
Playing at the Jacobs was a lot of fun. It was nice to be able to bring a little of what we do [as a band] into the Broadway theater.
Tell us the origin story of how y’all came to write music for this adaptation of The Outsiders. You said on stage that your son was just born when you started working on this and now he’s almost 9 years old?
He turns 9 in July! It’s hard to imagine, but he was two weeks old when we wrote “Stay Gold” (as sung by Sky Lakota-Lynch, aka Johnny). It was the first song we wrote for The Outsiders, and we almost didn’t even send it to the producers because we were certain they wouldn’t like it. Fortunately, we were wrong.
Were y’all interested in musical theater at all before this opportunity arose? What musicals did you look to for inspiration while writing? Which other musicians (in or out of theater) helped guide you?
We were simply theater voyeurs before this experience. Some of our favorite musicals include Come From Away, Fiddler on the Roof, Wicked, and My Fair Lady. We were lucky that early on in the process, we crossed paths with Justin Levine. He truly helped teach us the craft, and he is an absolute wealth of knowledge. Ultimately, he became a co-composer on the show.
Had you previously read S.E. Hinton’s book or seen Francis Ford Coppola’s movie version before you got this gig? How did you familiarize yourselves with those texts and heavy topics — murder, suicide, poverty, existentialism, etc. — while maintaining your own sound and identity as songwriters?
We both read the book in eighth grade. I’d seen the movie a long time ago as well. Upon getting this opportunity, we all watched the movie and read chapters from the book (often in the same room together) and tried hard to use the text as our true north. We did our best to get inside the heads of the individual characters and give them unique musical forms of expression. We also tried to write in a way that felt true to a 16-year-old.
How do you think you were able to inject some of your roots music identities into musical theater through this production? And in contrast, what are some of the biggest lessons from musical theater that you’ll take with you as singer-songwriters and touring musicians in the future?
We love to write songs that tell stories. This is the ultimate storytelling medium, and we really enjoyed it. We took influence from such a wide range of influences, and I believe that really helped us as we dipped our toes into different styles throughout the musical. There’s elements of soul, Americana, singer-songwriters, and country woven into the fabric of The Outsiders.
I think my biggest takeaway was the value of refinement. The more we learned, the more we cracked the songs back open and re-examined them. That refinement and willingness to continually edit was critical to this musical becoming what it is now.
