When two-time Tony-winning director Michael Arden (Maybe Happy Ending, Parade, and this fall’s The Queen of Versailles) began working on a Broadway-bound musical adaptation of the 1987 film The Lost Boys, he knew exactly whom he wanted to craft the score: a Los Angeles–based trio of singer/songwriters called The Rescues.
The producers of The Lost Boys, James Carpinello, Marcus Chait, and Patrick Wilson, took Arden’s suggestion and ran with it. They were on a mission, so when The Rescues were playing a show in Los Angeles, Carpinello and Chait, who both live on the West Coast, made sure to go. Two songs in, they knew they’d found the band to write their musical. “We were playing a show at the end of 2021,” recalls Gabriel Mann, one of the band members, “and we were pulled over by these two guys who said, ‘Hey, have you ever thought about doing a Broadway show?’ They thought there was only one band to write music for The Lost Boys — which is surprising, because we’re not exactly a household name.”
Even if you haven’t heard of The Rescues, whose other members are Kyler England and Adrianne Gonzalez (also known as AG), you’ve likely heard their songs on numerous film soundtracks and TV shows; five were featured in just one season of the hit Grey’s Anatomy. The group has also won critical acclaim for their often starkly atmospheric, harmony-laden recordings, which have earned comparisons to classic bands like the Eagles and Fleetwood Mac. Gonzalez describes the band as connected by “a throughline or an ethos: We want to write Rescues songs. You can dress a Rescues song up however you want … but it’s always a song that only the three of us could write. And we know when it’s right and when it’s not right.”
For The Lost Boys: A New Musical, set to begin previews March 27 and open April 26 at the Palace Theatre, starring Caissie Levy, LJ Benet, Ali Louis Bourzgui, Benjamin Pajak, Maria Wirries, and Paul Alexander Nolan, the source material provided certain challenges. Gonzalez had been a longtime fan of the movie, which follows teenage brothers as they move with their divorced mother to a town that has been invaded by vampires, finding it “fun and scary and campy.” England notes, “The structure is so great, the bones of it are so great, the characters are so great.”
Gonzalez wanted to open up the world of the female characters for the musical. “So it was a commitment for all three of us, but especially Kyler and me, to make sure these women are impactful,” she says. “We want to speak to moms, younger women, everybody, to be able to inject even more depth into the story that people wouldn’t expect.”
The three worked closely with the librettists, David Hornsby (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia writer and executive producer) and Chris Hoch. “We spent many, many hours on Zoom, throwing ideas back and forth,” England says, “giving notes on each other’s work.”
For Mann, “that’s the most exciting and interesting part of doing this. In TV and film, they talk about it being a collaborative process — and it is — but you’re often writing music after. It’s something that happens literally in post. This is the exact opposite: We’re building a story together with the writers from the very beginning. So the structural changes and what is a song and what’s not a song — these are discussions that are foundational to telling a story onstage.”
England admits that the process of editing and deciding which songs would work in the show “was hard in the first year, especially the first six months. It was foreign to us. Then we realized there was going to be a lot of editing, and I think we’re mostly not precious about our work at this point. I mean, there are a few songs in this show that it would kill us to have to throw away — absolutely kill us. But we have set songs to the side that we loved and believed in but realized weren’t doing what they were meant to do in the story.”
England adds, “Adrianne came up with this term, ‘the soul of a song.’ It’s about knowing what the soul of a song is and protecting that, not letting it get edited into oblivion for the sake of storytelling. Knowing which lyrics are the magical ones that have to stay, or we’ve lost the song.
So there is that balance … It’s been the steepest learning curve of our lives, and we’re still learning. And I love that.”
In fact, The Rescues are eager to take on another musical theater project. “This experience has been so gratifying and so wonderful on so many levels,” Mann says. “The people we’ve been working with, the thing we are making collectively has been so much bigger than we could have imagined. So, yeah — Broadway is gonna have a hard time getting rid of us!”
Listen to the first exclusive track from The Lost Boys. Buy your tickets now from Broadway Direct.
