Blood Brothers: How Michael Arden and Dane Laffrey Turned The Lost Boys into Broadway's Biggest Spectacle

In the 11 years since their Broadway collaboration launched with the Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening, director Michael Arden and designer Dane Laffrey have built one of the theater’s most singular creative partnerships. Their collaborations—Once on This Island, A Christmas Carol, Parade, Maybe Happy Ending, The Queen of Versailles, and now The Lost Boys—are defined by scale, audacity, and sheer ambition, based on a mutual trust first formed when they were teenagers at the Interlochen Arts Academy boarding school in Michigan.

Now, with The Lost Boys earning 12 Tony Award nominations, their collaboration has reached perhaps its most daring iteration yet. Based on the 1987 vampire cult classic, with a book by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch and a score by the Rescues, the production has become a throwback to the era of the Broadway mega-musicals, taking floor-to-ceiling advantage of the newly renovated Palace Theatre. In addition to their pending Tony nominations, the work earned Laffrey an Outer Critics Circle Award for scenic design, while Arden was recognized for co-creating the production’s lighting with Jen Schriever.

The movie was not a seminal work for either of them, despite being ’80s babies, and Arden only watched it because the stage producers pitched him the idea. The lack of familiarity worked to Arden’s advantage: for him, The Lost Boys, the musical, would be less of a nostalgia play and more about making something “really left of center when it comes to vampire fare and musical fare,” he says. “It seemed like it was a real opportunity to do something different, sexy, cool, and young.”

If Hornsby and Hoch’s book covers a lot of ground tonally (the musical veers between horror, heartfelt family scenes, broad comedy, and arena-rock spectacle), Laffrey’s visual world became the unifying fulcrum. But arriving at that world took years of experimentation before they figured it out.

One version of the physical production had been fully developed during the period they were simultaneously working on Maybe Happy Ending, but they realized it was fundamentally wrong and needed to be scrapped. “Never have we gone, like, nope, that’s totally the wrong design,” Laffrey says. “It had been presented to producers. People were looking at it. And then we just crumpled it up and threw it in the wastebasket.”

Eventually, a deceptively simple adjustment unlocked the doorway: “What if we just put the whole thing on an angle?” says Arden, “which opened up everything.”

That shift became the foundation for the three-story set that audiences now encounter at the Palace, an industrialized vision of the film’s Santa Carla where environments hover down from the flies and up from the pit to eventually meet in the middle. It’s a single mutable “container” that is surprising enough that “it can become unreliable and therefore scary,” Arden explains. That container allows the show’s mechanics to feel seamless even while constantly transforming before our eyes.

The Palace proved essential to realizing those ambitions. Because the production knew years in advance that it would occupy the theater, the creative team was able to design specifically for every inch of the building. “We had the theater 3D-scanned” for precision, Laffrey says. They knew where every indentation in the walls jutted out. “It’s a game of half-inches in there. The joke is that they’re using the production carpenter’s credit card as the distance that is appropriate for the flying.” That precision became necessary when even airflow could create problems. “There was a moment where the air conditioning was on a little bit more and scenery was blowing into each other,” Arden says.

For The Lost Boys, Arden also expanded his own role, co-designing the lighting alongside Schriever for the first time in his career, so he could integrate it directly into his staging process. “Oftentimes, directing and lighting are different departments and therefore they have different needs and wants,” Arden says. That integration proved especially important: “We don’t have overhead light, like you wouldn’t at a normal theater,” he explains. “There are a lot of interesting angles and things that we’ve kind of had to base the staging upon.”

Unlike many musicals, The Lost Boys arrived directly on Broadway without the benefit of an out-of-town tryout. Changes were made through various workshops, and even up to the final preview. In retrospect, Arden and Laffrey describe the production process as a collective act of endurance, where the unpredictability ultimately became energizing.

“We were all so frigging tired,” Arden says, “and yet, everybody was incredible. The stagehands are incredible. The spot ops are incredible. The dressers. Everyone is there and they’re like, ‘I love this show.’ Because they’re all being asked to do something they’ve never done before, and there’s a certain pride that comes with that. We did this together. We climbed a mountain together.”

That built a layer of trust that permeated the room. “It takes hundreds of people to put on a show every night. With this one, to not only put on a show, but keeps everyone in the building safe. There’s an incredible responsibility that everyone in that building is shouldering, and it’s inspiring that they’re doing so,” Arden says. “But I think I’ll never be able to watch the show and not squeeze my butt cheeks a little bit. So many things have to happen perfectly in order for it to seem effortless.”