There’s nothing easy about these riders. Early on in the Broadway version of The Lost Boys — the Tony-nominated musical based on the 1987 Joel Schumacher vampire picture — the titular crew of bloodsuckers goad the story’s still-human hero into a nighttime motorcycle race. It’s a sequence that comes straight out of the movie, but Schumacher had the benefit of being able to take his actors and their hogs outdoors for their wild ride. The challenge facing the musical’s Tony-winning director, Michael Arden, was matching the movie’s speed without being able to actually go anywhere.
But Arden also knew that he had a special power on his side. Not levitation like the eternally teenaged vampires at the center of the musical, but instead the elements of surprise and suggestion that’s central to great stagecraft. And when those two things work in concert, the audience’s imagination can fill in the outside reality that exists beyond the theatrical proscenium. “Imagination is always more thrilling than anything we could even begin to do,” Arden tells Gold Derby during an extended conversation with two key members of his creative team, scenic designer Dane Laffrey and co-lighting designer, Jen Schriever.
“As theater makers, at times our job is to show,” the director and co-lighting designer adds. “And at other times our job is to hand the production over to our greatest tool, which is the audience’s imagination.”
Through a mixture of elbow grease and imagination, The Lost Boys‘ motorcycle chase is a standout moment of spectacle in a show that’s filled with “How’d they do that?” moments. Those technical achievements are made possible by the show’s budget (reportedly in the $25 million range) and also reflected in its 12 Tony nominations. In addition to Best Musical, The Lost Boys received a Best Scenic Design nod for Laffrey, a Best Lighting Design nod shared by Arden and Schriever — the director’s first nomination in that category — and Arden’s fifth Best Director nomination.
For the record, the motorcycles audiences see onstage definitely aren’t imaginary… and they also aren’t exactly street legal. Laffrey reveals that the production originally purchased the same model of bike that Jason Patric — who originated the role of vamp-curious Michael that LJ Benet plays onstage — rode in the film. “We brought it into our workshop, and immediately were like, ‘Oh, it’s so heavy,'” he recalls. “It weighed so much and was so huge that we realized we couldn’t actually get it onstage.”
With that approach jettisoned, Laffrey invested in five lightweight motorcycles and stripped them down to the barest of bare essentials. “We still wanted to make them look like the kind of bikes that a rangy group of vampire rock stars would be riding around on,” he notes. “We also made sure that that they could change direction in a way that’s not germane to how a functional motorcycle could change direction. That way, the actors could figure out how to make these stationary objects feel like they’re moving.”
Two other effects contribute to that sense of motion. First, Arden had the idea of telescoping the cavernous stage at the Palace Theatre into a tightly-composed frame that directs the audience’s complete attention to the motorcycles. “We’re changing the aspect ratio,” Laffrey says, speaking in cinematic terms. “It gives it this Cinemascope feel that has a different energy, and really unlocks something about how that sequence works. It increases the pressure on everything just a bit.”
The second key element is lighting… or the lack of it. With the rest of the stage in blackness, Arden and Schriever crank up the motorcycle lights to, in her words, “blind the s–t out of the audience.”
“From a technical point of view, we wanted to confuse the viewer’s eyes by blinding them and then having them peer into a dark space,” he says with a smile. “You feel as unsafe as Michael does in that moment, and anytime you can make the audience feel what the character is feeling is something that we’re always in search of. There’s this huge payoff in staring at their faces in this tiny black void racing on these cool machines.”
And it’s not just the audience who get blinded. There are also lights stationed on the motorcycles shining upwards into the actors’ faces, making it equally hard for them to see. “They’re constantly blinded, but they’re so game,” Schriever says of the show’s young cast. “I’ve never had a more collaborative relationship with a cast. As a lighting designer, I don’t always get to meet the actors, but these performers have been so game and so involved to doing what we’re doing up there in the dark.”
In separate interviews, two of the actors involved in the motorcycle race confirm that the sequence is a team sport that brings together lighting, scenic design, and performance. “I played motorcycle arcade games as a kid, so it kind of feels like that,” says Tony-nominated actor Ali Louis Bourzgui, who suits up in Kiefer Sutherland’s leather ensemble as Lost Boys lead vamp, David. “We’re stationary for most of that sequence while everything is moving around us, and we have to pretend that we’re moving.
“That’s a part of the show where I have the film running in my brain,” Bourzgui continues. “I’m watching The Lost Boys in my mind and picturing all the terrain that they’re going over. I’m putting myself in that world, picturing myself jumping over staircases, riding on the beach, and going through the trees.”
In another effective touch, the other Lost Boys fall away as the joyride continues, leaving Michael and David as the remaining racers. And the lone Lost Girl, the not-yet-vamped Star — played by Maria Wirries — also vanishes into the blackness of the stage, an exit that the actress calls a “wild moment.”
“It is pitch black on that stage,” she says, laughing. “So you’re just kind of hoping that you remember where you’re supposed to go. There’s also these really intensely built mechanical things that are underneath the bikes to get them to move in certain ways, and fans and fog that recreate the race from the movie. It’s incredible that the team was able to do that and a real testament to the actors who take these leaps of faith every night and get on those machines that do these things. Every single person involved in this show is so brave, and I marvel at all of them.”
Like all great magicians, Arden and his collaborators are reluctant to give up too many of their trade secrets. But they admit to having dreams of turning all the lights on so that audiences can see what goes into making The Lost Boys fly — sometimes literally — night after night. “I want to do a whole documentary about the crew,” Schriever says, laughing. Laffrey concurs, emphasizing: “They are doing the craziest stuff all the time.”
As Arden notes, going big is the only way to make this level of Broadway spectacle possible. “The more effortless something appears onstage, the more effort is going in behind the scenes,” he says. “It’s great that we have so many people willing to think outside of their normal purview. From dressers putting harnesses onto people, to carpenters clipping people in the dark to stage managers doing all sorts of stuff, it’s a beautiful collaborative ballet. That’s my favorite thing about theater.”
