Last year, Michael Arden turned a musical about two robots into a Tony Award winner for best musical. This year, he’s taking on vampires.
The Tony-winning director is at the helm of “The Lost Boys,” a pricey stage adaptation of the 1987 cult-classic film. With 12 Tony nominations, including two for Arden himself (as a director and shared lighting design credit), the production has emerged as a frontrunner in several technical categories and become one of Broadway’s most talked-about new shows. But it’s also an expensive gamble, with a reported budget of $25 million. After all, the track record of shows based on vampires is truly frightening with everything from “Dracula, the Musical” to “Lestat” failing to draw crowds. Can “The Lost Boys” break the curse?
“You have to tune out the noise and listen to how people react in the theater,” Arden says.
A lot may depend on how “The Lost Boys” fares at Sunday’s Tony Awards, where it will compete for best musical alongside “Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York,” “Titanique,” and “Schmigadoon!”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What was it about “The Lost Boys” that made you think there might be a musical here?
I received an inquiry via my agents from our producers about it. I hadn’t ever seen the movie, so I immediately watched it with my husband, and thought, “Well, this is silly and fun and not what I expected at all.”
I was a big vampire fan, but mostly of the Anne Rice persuasion. So to see this thing about sexy biker vampires that is kind of niche and culty, I thought, that’s usually good fodder for musicals.
finally, the heart of it was a story about a family trying to start over and stay together amidst the winds of change and growing up. What could be fun about it is that it didn’t have to just be one genre. It could be comedy, romance, vampire thriller, horror. And that felt like something that could sing in a way like it was just off center enough.
The movie’s cult-ness could easily tip into camp. How do you balance that?
It all has to be based in emotional honesty. You can go see an incredible comedy, and the reason it works is because the characters believe what they’re chasing after in a major way.
With this, it’s literally life and death – or eternal life. The stakes, no pun intended, are already incredibly high. So it’s about never letting it become melodrama or slapstick. It has to ride this line where both the drama and the comedy are based in honesty.
It’s exciting to be in a theater and see 10-year-old kids loving it just as much as people in their 60s and 70s. Hopefully it’s inviting everybody to dip into a genre that might not be their favorite, but by the end they realize all these things can coexist.
©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
How do you honor the movie while still surprising longtime fans?
I think it’s about honoring the movie, highlighting its best moments and letting people feel taken care of – that the thing they’ve loved as a part of their lives is cherished by us.
But it’s also making sure we’re not bound to it. Theater is an entirely different art form, and it has different requirements. You need different things when you enter a Broadway theater and sit down for two and a half hours than you do when you’re watching a movie for 90 minutes. Hopefully they’re companion pieces.
What did you learn from audiences when the show was still in previews, and what do you look for when you’re watching a crowd react?
Just their honest reaction. You can tell when people fidget. You can tell when people aren’t applauding like you hoped they would.
I love standing at the back of the orchestra so I can get a peek at people watching the show. It’s the most incredible thing to see people sit in silence when they lean forward together. We live in a world where so much of the time we are all on different paths and journeys, and then in the time of a play, you can mind-meld a group of people to laugh at the same time, gasp at the same time or — God forbid — feel something at the same time.
That’s my favorite thing anytime I’m working on a show – a group reaction. We need to all feel things together.
We want to leave people with a challenge or a question they can take into their own lives. With “The Lost Boys,” hopefully it’s to remind people that we don’t have a chance at everlasting life, and therefore we have to make every minute count.
There’s often criticism of adapting existing IP. What’s the upside?
It’s the creation of empathy. You go to the theater to see stories outside your own lived experience. Hopefully not too many people have been in the situation Michael, and his family find themselves in. But by the end you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s me.’ That’s empathy in its simplest form.
The more disparate communities we can get into a theater, just helps build a stronger community overall. These might be robots, these might be vampires, these people might be living on an island ransacked by a storm, but I am like them, and therefore they are like me.
Matthew Murphy
This is an incredibly ambitious technical production. Was there ever an effect in rehearsal that made you think, “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to pull this off”?
I mean, all of them. And they continue to be. We certainly saw stuff on stage and were immediately like, ‘Nope, not gonna do that. Let’s not do that.’
I want people leaving saying, ‘I loved that story. I loved those people. I loved those songs.’ I don’t want them leaving thinking, ‘Oh my God, the special effects were amazing.’ yes, that’s great, but the effects have to serve the story.
It’s always a balancing act. You have to really make sure: am I showing something off because we can, or is it actually an exciting way to tell the story that’s going to make the audience believe in vampires?
What’s been the biggest challenge of making theater right now?
Theater is so expensive to make. We’re not a big studio. These are three independent producers, and if you go out of town with a show, you’ve got to take $5 million off your budget just to do that. Warner Bros. had the property, but this isn’t “Harry Potter.” So we thought, let’s put the money onstage and make this thing how we want it the first time [and skip an out of town tryout].
New York is one of the most expensive cities in the world, it involves a ton of people and unions, and since COVID it’s gotten exponentially more expensive. So making sure you’re still delivering quality when that’s a factor has been the hardest thing.
And now, everyone is able to be a critic because they have a phone in their hand. The process is different than it once was. It’s not like you get to develop something, test it, and wait until the critics arrive. People are putting things on the internet at the first preview.
This isn’t your first project this season. How has “The Lost Boys” differed from “Queen of Versailles”?
They’re night and day in terms of what kind of shows they are and what they’re about. It’s actually really nice to get to move between worlds. I love the world of “Queen of Versailles.” I love getting to live in satire and documentary style, and then coming to this, which is so epic and moody and dark and also has slapstick comedy. I’m grateful I get to work on projects that allow me to fully change clothes between them. I’d rather have a blueberry and a strawberry than an orange and a tangerine.
Finally, you’re also working on a stage musical adaptation of “Happy Feet.” Can you tease anything about that?
It’s going to be so funny. I can’t get through a reading of it without crying my eyes out. After spending so much time on a show that’s about darkness, that show is going to be so much about light. Even just the color palettes. It’s exciting. Anthropomorphic animals are something I haven’t really done before. We love penguins because they feel so human. There’s incredible puppetry in the show, and the music is every one of your favorite songs. Every artist we’ve approached about using their songs has immediately said ‘yes.’ That’s the power of the penguin.
Source: variety.com
