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.
In “The Lost Boys,” a new musical based on the 1987 film, 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 to make room for street-level development. That project led to an unusual amount of space below the stage, and “The Lost Boys” is the first show to demonstrate the stagecraft potential offered by the theater’s height and depth since the building reopened in 2024.
“We wanted the space to feel incredibly cavernous, and we were interested in playing with vertical space,” said Michael Arden, the show’s Tony-nominated director. “We’re 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.”
“The Lost Boys,” about a family hoping for a fresh start in a California town that turns out to have a vampire problem, is nominated for 12 Tony Awards, including for its set, lighting and sound. It’s a big show, in every sense of the word — 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.
“Things evaporate in every direction,” said Dane Laffrey, the show’s Tony-nominated scenic designer. “We wanted the space to materialize and dematerialize.”
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’ lair. Even a freight elevator is part of the three-tiered set, another element suggesting deep descent.
“It’s awesome. It’s vast. It’s scary,” 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. “We hear noises, often, and the space is so big you don’t know where it’s coming from. I’m often terrified, but the whole show is a massive trust fall.”
Because the show is about vampires, one effect matters more than all the others. “We need the audience to believe people are flying,” Laffrey said.
It’s a feat with a long history — think of Mary Martin in “Peter Pan” — and still involves wires and harnesses, though with a lot more technological bells and whistles than there were in the 1950s. “Oddly enough, I’ve been asked to do flying tricks for a bit now,” said Ali Louis Bourzgui, who plays David, the lead vampire, and is a first-time Tony nominee. “When I was 12 years old I did a production of ‘Seussical’ in Pittsfield [Mass.], and for my number I had pretty much the same flying rig that I’m in now.”
“Growing up, I had a big fear of heights,” he said, “but it’s been kicked out of me.”
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.
“It was scary in the beginning, just because of the height aspect, but it’s really interesting how your nervous system can get used to anything after a while,” he said. “Sometimes it genuinely feels like I’m flying.”
But there’s more: Vampires, like bats, sleep upside down, at least in the world of “The Lost Boys.” That means that the actors must, for a little over a minute, hang by their feet.
“When we first started doing that, it was pretty intense, because all the blood rushes to your head pretty quickly, and it’s not really a natural thing your body’s used to doing,” Bourzgui said. “But because we’ve been doing that so much, I just do some deep yoga breaths so my nervous system doesn’t freak out. If I just breathe, and let my body know it’s OK, then sometimes it just feels like a good stretch.”
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 — landing out of sight of the audience.
“You need the bodies to build up enough velocity that it feels like, ‘Oh my God, they are literally dropping into an abyss,’ and if you’re sitting in the orchestra and you see them pass out of view, they’re continuing to fall pretty far in order to ask for that effect to work for all of the people in the theater,” Laffrey said. “That extra depth was an amazing asset.”
A sort of padded trampoline at the bottom of a deep orchestra pit breaks their fall. “It feels like landing on a cloud,” Bourzgui said.
As in the film, Michael, the older brother, played onstage by LJ Benet, floats in the clouds after letting go of the bridge.
The theater’s depth and height can also be seen in less perilous moments.
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’s orchestra elevator is to create a mosh pit in which fans of that band can dance. The song, nodding to the band’s sinister motivations, is called “Have to Have You.”
“It’s one of my favorite moments, when they all sink down and suddenly we are there with them,” Arden said. “I 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’s as if we turned a camera around and we are in the mosh pit.”
And why so much emphasis on spectacle?
“We have to create a world that is magical and realistic at the same time, and therefore spectacle always seemed important for this,” Arden said. “I’m sure one day, when there’s 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’re coming to see a vampire rock musical, you want to see something pretty spectacular.”
