“It’s helped me to trust that even on my not amazing days, or even on my greatest days, that either way, the story is being communicated,” reflects Brody Grant on how receiving a Tony nomination for his performance in “The Outsiders” has affected him. The actor makes his Broadway debut in the role of Ponyboy in the new original musical based on the famous S. E Hinton novel of the same name from 1967. The recognition has helped him “silence” some of his self-doubt and says it’s “a gift, because it’s great source material.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
Even though Grant performed in the La Jolla production of the show back in 2023 and has settled into the Broadway run, he still revisits Hinton’s original novel every day. “Every time I crack open that book, I find something that I haven’t found before, it’s like a great piece of music,” reflects the Tony nominee. He has made reading it a part of his “pre-show tradition,” explaining, “I just flip it to a random page and I read a little snippet, sometimes a sentence is enough, sometimes a paragraph… I can take that and let it influence me while I’m in the show, kind of like setting an intention.”
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Grant enters through the house and sits on stage journalling as Ponyboy before the houselights dim and the musical properly begins. The actor calls this pre-show “an amazing thing,” in part because the Jacobs Theatre would be a completely alien place for his character. “This is not a space that Ponyboy is used to, a big fancy theatre with horses on the walls, Pegasus, golden Pegasus, little emblems on the booths,” he notes. Once he’s on the stage, he cracks open Ponyboy’s notebook and writes. The Tony nominee shares, “I will always start with Ponyboy’s signature, and then I always start with, ‘When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I only had two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home,’” referring to the opening lines of the show that he will deliver momentarily.
The actor relishes those moments to get into character and the chance to “get his bearings” as Ponyboy. “Sometimes, I really feel what happened a year before this musical started, which is the loss of his parents,” notes Grant as to what kinds of feelings surface as he’s journalling. He also gets to “absorb” the energy of the audience, sharing, “When I talk to the audience, sometimes I cast them as his parents, sometimes I cast them as people in Brody’s life, sometimes I don’t case them as anything at all.” Those few minutes connecting with the audience are so vital because the actor gets “to really sit and breathe with them and that is a real gift that lets the nerves melt off.” The performer says it is also a time when he reflects on how Ponyboy “is a very specific segment of what I feel like is my identity and my spirit.”
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Grant almost never leaves the stage during “The Outsiders,” and one of his standout moments is the song “Great Expectations,” during which Ponyboy is meditating on the connection between his life and the characters in the Charles Dickens’ novel of the same name. He says his vocal performance in that number is influenced by The Lumineers and Frank Ocean, the former because “they can really soar up there really high,” and the latter because he “has this heaviness in his soul… it’s aching out of him.” He wanted to bring that yearning quality to the material because, as he says, “I thought it was really important for Ponyboy as this young kid that is aching for something that he can’t quite put his finger on, all he can really call it is great expectations because he sees himself in this book.”
The climax of the song features the voices of many of the ensemble members who accompany Ponyboy for a transcendent moment of soaring harmonies. Grant says that all the cast members of “The Outsiders” are “very special people to me,” adding, “I feel like I know all of these people’s hearts pretty well, not just as the characters but as the people.” This section of shared vocal expression in the song is so powerful to him because “it really feels like a semi-orchestral experience where I’m allowed to sing with all my guts and my soul.” The Tony nominee emphasizes that this standout song was added to the show in “the 11th hour,” calling it a “special, special, special segment” of the larger musical.