Episode Details

The Lost Boys, based on the 1987 Joel Schumacher cult film, has arrived on Broadway with twelve Tony nominations, the most of any musical this season. Patrick Pacheco sits down with the artists behind it, beginning with director Michael Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffrey, the team whose collaboration on Maybe Happy Ending won the Tony Award for Best Musical. They discuss why an "impossible" adaptation was exactly what drew them in, how they balanced horror, comedy, romance, and family drama without ever letting the audience feel safe, and how they engineered a three-story set so packed it comes down to the quarter inch. Arden and Laffrey trace the show's deeper currents too: the chosen-family theme set against Reagan-era ideas of the family, the abusive father invented for the stage, the inverted boy-band innocence of the vampires, and the act of faith it took to open on Broadway with no out-of-town tryout. Then Pacheco talks with Ali Louis Bourzgui, the Tony-nominated actor breaking Broadway's vampire curse as David, the charismatic and terrifying leader of the pack. Bourzgui opens up about building David from Bowie, Tim Curry, and Anne Rice, the loneliness buried beneath immortality, the queerness and danger he plays in "my blood is in your veins," and how his Moroccan and Irish-Italian upbringing, his Muslim faith, and his activism shape the artist he is becoming.

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