It was February 2023 when “The Outsiders” landed on Marylee Fairbanks’s desk. Two things convinced the actress and producer to support bringing the musical adaptation to Broadway: the story’s multigenerational appeal, and its award-winning female director, Danya Taymor.
“You have to have a very strong female perspective when you have such a large cast of male energy,” Fairbanks said in a recent Zoom interview. It was late June, just after said musical took home four Tony Awards, incuding Best New Musical.
The Emerson College alumna had “loved” S. E. Hinton’s 1967 coming-of-age novel as a kid, and grew up with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film adaptation. Fairbanks, who now lives in West Boxford, said the musical’s new perspective and creative and production teams helped bring the story to the present: “We need to build our next generation of theatergoers, and shows like ‘The Outsiders’ help to do that.”
Before “The Outsiders,” Tima Productions co-produced “Kimberly Akimbo,” a five-time Tony award-winning Broadway musical that follows a teenager who looks like a 72-year-old woman due to an aging disease. The show, co-written by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, won best musical at the Tonys in 2023.
“When I’m reading scripts and when I’m being approached to join a production, the first question I ask myself is ‘Why are we telling this story?,’” she said. “Because if you’re going to tell the story so that you can be a part of a quote, ‘big hit,’ or to quote, ‘get rich,’ that to me is the wrong reason.”
Fairbanks, in 2021, after taking several years away from the theater industry to raise her son, invested her storytelling passion into “Stages,” a podcast that puts herself and her cohost, Stephanie J. Block (whom she shared a dressing room with on the set of “The Will Rogers Follies”), in conversation with a variety of theater professionals.
The podcast aims to go “beyond the resume,” she says, and she considers the show almost a “guidebook” for young performers, as she and Block discuss different “life conditions” her peers are confronted with on both a personal and professional level — things like recovering from failure and balancing parenthood with a performing career.
“We have these real, eye-opening, honest human conversations with some of the most incredible performers that ever stood on the stage,” she said.
“Stages,” now in its fourth season, boasts an average of 20 to 30 episodes in its three prior seasons. The podcast combines many of the things that “make her up” in her life — theater, friendship, and motherhood — which Fairbanks says “excited” her because she believes “we’re never made up of just one thing.”
“What’s wonderful in life is when all of the things that you learn along the way come together in a way that you hadn’t expected, and that’s what sort of happened with the ‘Stages’ podcast,” she said. “[’Stages’] is another aspect of my life where I’m doing something not for an outcome but because there’s joys and challenges within it.”
“Kimberly Akimbo” embarks on its national tour in September in Utica, N.Y. “The Outsiders” begins its national tour in the fall of 2025 in Tulsa, Okla.
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