The first vampire descends from the shadows, high above the stage, barely visible as he comes in for the kill. Four vampires disappear into a dark void below the stage after dropping, one by one, from a trestle bridge.<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Lost Boys<\/a>,\u201d a new musical based on the 1987 film<\/a>, spectacle abounds. It is being staged in a Broadway house with an only-in-New-York real estate story: After a century on the ground, the Palace Theater was hoisted 30 feet in the air<\/a> to make room for street-level development. That project led to an unusual amount of space below the stage, and \u201cThe Lost Boys\u201d is the first show to demonstrate the stagecraft potential offered by the theater\u2019s height and depth since the building reopened in 2024.<\/p>\n \u201cWe wanted the space to feel incredibly cavernous, and we were interested in playing with vertical space,\u201d said Michael Arden, the show\u2019s Tony-nominated director. \u201cWe\u2019re used to things coming on from stage left and stage right, but we wanted to deliver things from above and below, given that vampires attack from above, and pull you down below a little bit.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Lost Boys<\/a>,\u201d about a family hoping for a fresh start<\/a> in a California town that turns out to have a vampire problem, is nominated for 12 Tony Awards<\/a>, including for its set, lighting and sound. It\u2019s a big show, in every sense of the word \u2014 costly, with a $25 million budget; loud, with a pop-rock score by the Rescues; and spectacle-heavy, with nonstop motion, much of it automated, involving set pieces, and people, moving on and offstage, left and right, up and down, with a lot of backstage work required to ensure nothing collides.<\/p>\n \u201cThings evaporate in every direction,\u201d said Dane Laffrey, the show\u2019s Tony-nominated scenic designer. \u201cWe wanted the space to materialize and dematerialize.\u201d<\/p>\n The outer set is dark, industrial-looking and 65 feet high. So when the house, the store, the boardwalk and the playground that sometimes nest within it are hoisted up or dropped down or tracked aside, the stage becomes the abandoned iron works that is the vampires\u2019 lair. Even a freight elevator is part of the three-tiered set, another element suggesting deep descent.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s awesome. It\u2019s vast. It\u2019s scary,\u201d said Shoshana Bean, nominated for a Tony Award for her portrayal of Lucy, a newly single mother of two teen boys, Michael and Sam, struggling to find their place in the world. \u201cWe hear noises, often, and the space is so big you don\u2019t know where it\u2019s coming from. I\u2019m often terrified, but the whole show is a massive trust fall.\u201d<\/p>\n Because the show is about vampires, one effect matters more than all the others. \u201cWe need the audience to believe people are flying,\u201d Laffrey said.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a feat with a long history \u2014 think of Mary Martin in \u201cPeter Pan\u201d \u2014 and still involves wires and harnesses, though with a lot more technological bells and whistles than there were in the 1950s. \u201cOddly enough, I\u2019ve been asked to do flying tricks for a bit now,\u201d said Ali Louis Bourzgui, who plays David, the lead vampire, and is a first-time Tony nominee. \u201cWhen I was 12 years old I did a production of \u2018Seussical\u2019 in Pittsfield [Mass.], and for my number I had pretty much the same flying rig that I\u2019m in now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cGrowing up, I had a big fear of heights,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it\u2019s been kicked out of me.\u201d<\/p>\n Bourzgui said flying has required a considerable amount of physical training to build core strength; a lot of safety practice, and regular cold plunges for recovery.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was scary in the beginning, just because of the height aspect, but it\u2019s really interesting how your nervous system can get used to anything after a while,\u201d he said. \u201cSometimes it genuinely feels like I\u2019m flying.\u201d<\/p>\n But there\u2019s more: Vampires, like bats, sleep upside down, at least in the world of \u201cThe Lost Boys.\u201d That means that the actors must, for a little over a minute, hang by their feet.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen we first started doing that, it was pretty intense, because all the blood rushes to your head pretty quickly, and it\u2019s not really a natural thing your body\u2019s used to doing,\u201d Bourzgui said. \u201cBut because we\u2019ve been doing that so much, I just do some deep yoga breaths so my nervous system doesn\u2019t freak out. If I just breathe, and let my body know it\u2019s OK, then sometimes it just feels like a good stretch.\u201d<\/p>\n The musical diverges from the film in multiple ways. But one scene was deemed so iconic that it needed to be preserved: The moment when the vampire gang hangs off a railway bridge and then drops into the clouds. In the show, the vampires, untethered, drop off a trestle and fall through an opening in the stage \u2014 landing out of sight of the audience.<\/p>\n \u201cYou need the bodies to build up enough velocity that it feels like, \u2018Oh my God, they are literally dropping into an abyss,\u2019 and if you\u2019re sitting in the orchestra and you see them pass out of view, they\u2019re continuing to fall pretty far in order to ask for that effect to work for all of the people in the theater,\u201d Laffrey said. \u201cThat extra depth was an amazing asset.\u201d<\/p>\n A sort of padded trampoline at the bottom of a deep orchestra pit breaks their fall. \u201cIt feels like landing on a cloud,\u201d Bourzgui said.<\/p>\n As in the film, Michael, the older brother, played onstage by LJ Benet, floats in the clouds after letting go of the bridge.<\/p>\n The theater\u2019s depth and height can also be seen in less perilous moments.<\/p>\n The vampires, when not feasting on the blood of unsuspecting citizens, moonlight as a rock band, and one of the most effective uses of the theater\u2019s orchestra elevator is to create a mosh pit in which fans of that band can dance. The song, nodding to the band\u2019s sinister motivations, is called \u201cHave to Have You.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one of my favorite moments, when they all sink down and suddenly we are there with them,\u201d Arden said. \u201cI wanted to be able to play with perspective, so that we first start with Michael and the group looking toward the audience, and then we drop them down into a mosh pit, they turn around, and it\u2019s as if we turned a camera around and we are in the mosh pit.\u201d<\/p>\n And why so much emphasis on spectacle?<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to create a world that is magical and realistic at the same time, and therefore spectacle always seemed important for this,\u201d Arden said. \u201cI\u2019m sure one day, when there\u2019s a revival, there will be an amazing version of the show someone comes up with that uses nothing and is in a black box, but I felt like if you\u2019re coming to see a vampire rock musical, you want to see something pretty spectacular.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first vampire descends from the shadows, high above the stage, barely visible as he comes in for…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":823682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[9],"tags":[338474,191351,40317,338473,171,310886,310885,310887,310884,1148,310118,317743,67,132,68,85369],"class_list":["post-823681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ali-louis","tag-arden","tag-bean","tag-bourzgui","tag-entertainment","tag-michael-1982","tag-palace-theater","tag-shoshana","tag-the-lost-boys-play","tag-theater","tag-theater-broadway","tag-tony-awards-theater-awards","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-vis-photo"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116642031008890849","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/823682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}