At just 24, Ali Louis Bourzgui left the national tour of Company to make his Broadway debut in the 2024 revival of The Who’s Tommy. He went from sweetly serenading his skittish fiancée as Paul to high-belting rock anthems as the deeply traumatized pinball wizard Tommy Walker. By the time his hypnotic Orpheus falsetto rallied the people of Hadestown, the only way to track Bourzgui from one chameleonic performance to the next was by his signature head of ringlets.
That’s all over now.
A bleach-blond Billy Idol wig completes Bourzgui’s total transformation into David, the glam-punk leader of The Lost Boys’ title vampire biker gang. The new musical, scored by The Rescues and adapted from the 1987 film, has earned 12 Tony Award nominations, including one for Bourzgui’s performance. It’s his first nomination, two seasons after what many fans considered an egregious snub. But for this methodical, introverted actor, everything is unfolding at the right time.
Between Tommy in The Who’s Tommy, Orpheus in Hadestown, and now ’80s rocker vampire David in The Lost Boys, you’ve become one of Broadway’s most impressive shapeshifters. I’m especially curious about how you transform your speaking voice for each character. Has that always been something you’ve paid attention to?
Even before I got into acting, I was kind of obsessed with animation and voice acting. One of my weird high school hyperfixations was watching YouTube videos and learning how to do impersonations. So manipulating my voice has always been something I’m kind of interested in. But once I started acting, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just doing impressions of people, but crafting a voice that still has my voice at the center, just with different flavors.
Does David’s voice have specific inspirations?
It came from quite a few things. I watched the original movie, and I thought Kiefer [Sutherland]’s voice was integral to the character. There was something about his timbre that draws you into him. It’s part of the seduction. So I knew that I had to have something similar. And then I pulled inspiration from some of the Stranger Things characters, like Billy and Vecna. And I grew up a Harry Potter fan, so there’s a little Voldemort. But at the same time, David is a rock star, so I also wanted to pull from David Bowie and Tim Curry and their fluid rock-star performances in Labyrinth and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I had a good four months between Hadestown and this where I just kind of disappeared into my apartment and became a sponge.
David seems to have the same kind of magnetic stillness that you gave Tommy. Do the two characters share any DNA?
I think there is totally a similar center there. I think they’re both individuals who hold a lot of pain inside, and then to deal with the trauma they have, they become powerful forces on the outside. I’ve also always liked this tenet in acting where, if you want to be the one thing onstage that’s different, you check out the movement patterns of everything else around you and you’re the sole opposite. Within the tornadoes of both of these shows, I try to be the stone in the middle. That’s what draws your eye.
Have you come up with your own backstory to explain how David became Santa Carla’s vampire gang leader?
Oooh yeah. I knew coming into this that I really wanted to figure out what his human life was like to make him feel real. I was just gonna write some bullet points, but then I got carried away and wrote a whole short story. I have some plans in the future to edit it a little more and clean it up. I think it would be a nice thing to unofficially send out there for a Broadway Cares event and raise some charity money for it. I’ve already been having a lot of the fans itching for the lore. This is not signed off by Warner Bros. [Laughs.]
Jumping back to Tommy, that Broadway debut really shot you out of a cannon.
Those are the exact words I use too.
How did that experience inform how you approached this time with The Lost Boys?
Tommy gave me so many gifts and made me grow so much. At the time, it was a highly stressful experience. I love doing this kind of work, but as Ali, it’s hard for me to be seen at all hours of the day without finding time to recharge. And when I was doing Tommy, I was 23 and 24. I had never done that level of press, it was my first time performing in New York, it was my first time doing that kind of singing role with that marathon level of never leaving the stage. But because I dove in from the deep end, I learned how to speak up for myself, I learned how to speak up for my cast, I learned how to be a leader, I learned how to grow my voice. And because this is so much more of an ensemble piece, it feels like we really are in it together.
Did not getting a Tony nomination on your first go-round help prepare you for this moment?
Oh yeah. It was a gift at the time. It would have been too many boxes to check off all at once. And then I went and did We Live in Cairo at New York Theatre Workshop, where I got to re-center my art in making an ensemble show in a really small venue with like five people. Coming into this season, I feel so much more rooted in the community. I’m so glad it happened this time around because I’m much more prepared for it and have been able to kind of not take it so seriously.
Speaking of not taking things too seriously, we have to talk about your Miscast performance of “Total Eclipse of the Heart” with your Lost Boys costar LJ Benet.
Miscast was the night after our opening, so we almost were not gonna do it. We were making insane changes every day till opening, so we barely had any time to work on the thing. But I’ve watched Miscast for years, and one of my favorites of all time was Aaron Tveit and Gavin Creel doing “Take Me or Leave Me,” so I knew that I wanted a flavor of that. And then, to be honest, everything you saw onstage was improv. We talked about, “Hey, at the end let’s wrap our arms around each other and do the thing where we sing into each other’s mics.” But that was the only thing we planned. At one point, I turned around and LJ was on his knees. Sara Chase and Alex Brightman had just come out in CATS costumes, Jane Krakowski was right before us with full choreo, so I was like, “Well, I guess I gotta step it up. Here we go.” I had scraped knees for like two days, but it was worth it. In the press cycle, I think we can all get a little serious. So for there to be a night to just goof around, I think it helps us as actors to be like, “Oh yeah, we’re all here for fun.”
You can catch Ali Louis Bourzgui in The Lost Boys, now playing at the Palace Theatre on Broadway.
