Michael Arden Makes Theater for the Millions

An excerpt of this interview first appeared in Stage Whisperer, Vulture’s weekly newsletter for theater gossip, interviews, and more. Sign up here.

Michael Arden has had, undoubtedly, the most interesting past 12 months of anyone in the theater industry. In June 2025, he won his second Tony Award for Best Director in three years for his work on Maybe Happy Ending, which crowned him as one of the great young talents in an industry that desperately needs young talent. By late summer, Maybe Happy Ending’s narrative had curdled. The show came under intense criticism from fans and Broadway actors for casting a white actor, Andrew Barth Feldman, in a role that was originally played by Darren Criss. A few months later, Arden opened his newest musical, Queen of Versailles, starring Kristin Chenoweth with music by Wicked composer Stephen Schwartz. Despite being created by a dream team, the musical was an unmitigated flop that our critic Sara Holdren referred to as “a two-hour-and-40-minute luxury-car crash.”

Instead of taking time off to lick his wounds, by the time Versailles had closed in December, Arden was already in the process of putting together his next project: a musical adaptation of Joel Schumacher’s 1987 teen-vampire flick The Lost Boys. The musical, which was the last show to open this season, is a spectacle with a scope unseen on Broadway in recent years. Harkening back to the Cameron Mackintosh–produced projects of the ’80s (Les Misérables, Phantom of the Opera, Miss Saigon, etc.), nearly every number includes a major set piece of some kind. The story follows a mother named Lucy Emerson (Shoshana Bean) and her two boys, the despondent elder brother Michael (L.J. Benet) and the younger, quirkier Sam (Benjamin Pajak), who move to a fictional town called Santa Carla to escape their abusive father. It turns out the town is crawling with vampires, led by David (Ali Louis Bourzgui), who attempt to recruit Michael. The vampires fly with shocking agility and hang upside down; there is a queer superhero number featuring an ensemble in rainbow costumes; Bean belts while being spun around a playground roundabout. It’s all so much. For many, in a world where musical theater is an increasingly risky business financially, the spectacle is ultimately thrilling. And the Tonys agreed: This week, the show scored the most nominations of any show this year (tied with Schmigadoon!), including one for Arden as Best Director.

With Lost Boys’s remarkable number of Tony nominations putting a happy ending on an odd season for Arden, we chatted about the full past 12 months, including Queen of Versailles’s failure, Maybe Happy Ending’s difficulties, and, most of all, the overwhelming size of The Lost Boys.

The Lost Boys scored 12 Tony nominations, the most of the year, tied with Schmigadoon!. How are you feeling?
You have to remind yourself that awards for art are insane, and yet an acknowledgement in any category is an acknowledgement of all the people who support the work. People worked so hard on Lost Boys, so I’m proud of that. Let’s be real. If a show wins Best Musical, it will be seen by more people, and it might have a better chance at having a tour. Awards and commerciality go hand in hand, and so that’s what excites me most.

The show was beloved by the Tonys, whereas The Queen of Versailles closed and was shut out. What was that like?
I expected it. Ultimately, the Tony Awards are a three-hour commercial, so it’s rare that a closed show gets nods. I think the writing on that show was significant and interesting, and the performers’ work was thrilling. I understand the landscape. I feel so lucky that so many people who got nominations for Lost Boys also worked on Queen of Versailles.

How did you feel about the Lost Boys reviews?
Given that we were doing a vampire musical, I was girding my loins for reviews. After the year with Queen of Versailles, I was just like, I’m proud of what we did, but if nobody gets it, nobody gets it. So I was surprised and pleased at the reviews. The show is not going to be for everybody, but it seemed like people found things to love even if it wasn’t for them. I didn’t delve too deep into the reviews because, by the time we opened, I was already jumping in the next morning to a workshop of a new show and wanted to put all my attention there.

Between reviews and Tony nominations, the precursor nominations came out. The Lost Boys did very poorly at the Drama Desks. Why do you think the Tonys were more enthusiastic?
Drama Desks are shared with all theater in New York, and what they’re looking to honor is different than the most exciting work on Broadway. It’s looking at the artists that need to be and should be recognized for making work that might not ever be on Broadway. I’ve done a lot of Broadway work that was overlooked by the Drama Desks before, so I wasn’t really surprised by it.

Going back, how did you arrive at Lost Boys as a piece of adaptation?
In the summer of ’21, I got an email from my agents that three producers, Patrick Wilson, Marcus Chait, and James Carpinello, wanted to meet with me about doing The Lost Boys. I was like, “What’s The Lost Boys?” I was in Provincetown with my husband [actor Andy Mientus], and we watched the movie, and I was like, What a weird idea for a musical. And that usually means it’s a good idea for a musical.

Given that your producers, your songwriting team, the band the Rescues, and your book writers had never made a Broadway musical before, what was your job like in this process?
My job was to keep the train on the track and make sure that, above all, the production is at the center. Everything has to serve the experience the audience has within the two and a half hours. It’s not “This lyric or this song or this scene is great on paper.” It’s my job to collate the ideas and make sure that the product is enjoyable.

What was your relationship like with the original movie and its fans?
There’s a sense of not wanting to fuck it up — I don’t want to betray fans or piss people off. But theater is a completely different art form than film and therefore has different demands of materials. We’re staying true to the energy of the thing, because that is what people are drawn to. Then it’s a balancing act of making sure you haven’t strayed too far.

You removed two major characters: the grandfather and the kid vampire. How did you come to that?
It was partly because of necessity. You have to have two understudies on Broadway for every person. It’s a cost question in that respect. We also got rid of the dog, because once you add animals to a Broadway show, it gets tricky. We wanted to buy more real estate for the female characters. In the film, Star and Lucy are props to the actions of the boys. I don’t know if that is what we’re doing now. I don’t think it should be.

In ’87, when the movie came out, it was a revolutionary idea to depict sexy teenage vampires. Now that’s incredibly ingrained in the culture. How did you think about trying to keep the vampires feeling fresh?
I was never trying to think, How do I make this fresh? Now I’m hearing you say that, maybe I should have. What’s fun about this movie is its tone: It’s a horror movie, a sexy teen movie, an adventure comedy, and a family drama. It never felt like I needed to freshen it. I had to do the time period justice and pull out all of the deliciousness of 1987 without making it fetish. It can be easy to make fun of the ’80s, and we didn’t want to do that in the score, the instrumentation, the costumes, or the hair. It still wants to be sexy.

Michael Arden.
Photo: Matthew Murphy

Watching the show, I kept wondering: What is the artistic value of spectacle, in the Cameron Mackintosh–type sensibility?
Those are how I cut my teeth. I was born in ’82, so the first shows I became obsessed with were Phantom and Les Miz. When you go to see a musical, you go to see a show. There has to be a visual element that takes you to another place, even if it’s a really simple design. I’m not necessarily equating that with money, but I do think people want an event. Especially if you’re going to see a musical with vampires, in order to suspend our disbelief, we have to create a visual world which truly takes people on a ride. In my past work, like Parade, we’re very much saying, “This is a theater. These are actors.” For this story, because the audience has to suspend so many disbelief bubbles, it required spectacle. I tried to contemplate the black-box version with no flying.

The Jamie Lloyd version.
Jamie Lloyd does spectacle, actually. Some of his visual imagery is the best shit out there. If you’re going to pay 250 bucks to see a show — which is what we’re going to ask, if not more — and it’s money that you earned doing a job that doesn’t take you away from reality, then it’s my job to do that. It was always clear that we had to surprise and delight in order to give people the childlike sense of wonder.

I came of age during the time of Next to Normal and Fun Home, when small musicals were surprising anomalies to root for. These days, that kind of tiny musical playing a Broadway house is par for the course — look at Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York) this season. I was surprised to find Lost Boys’s spectacle bracing and exciting. 
It doesn’t happen in America these days. If we get something that is going for shock-to-the-system spectacle, it’s been done in England first, in a way that is affordable. No one makes this stuff here, because it’s too expensive to do. When we were putting this together, people were saying, “Where are you going to go do our out-of-town tryout?” We had a conversation where I said, “We could do that, but then wouldn’t it be better to put that $5 million on stage for the audience that we actually are making the thing for?” It was a huge risk. But the economics of theater is so insane that it became important to me that we put the resources behind the actual thing. People were going to sit on Broadway and watch it.

As opposed to ART and playing in a small house?
Listen, I’m incredibly grateful to all these theaters, but you’re not paying for the production. You’re paying for the theater to exist and run. And you’re paying to load in and out a show, which is insane. It was clear to us that, in order to achieve this spectacle, this was the only way. It was a really big risk and hopefully a reward, because people are responding to that. It’s not like we’ve got one moment in act one and one moment in act two that are cool. The whole show is a spectacle.

Why is spectacle helpful to you?
When people fully buy into something and are shocked and awed, that’s when you can really do the emotional surgery. It’s the best anesthesia. Then, you’re more open to the ideas and moral questions and the emotional storytelling. You’re able to project yourself into the world a little bit easier because there isn’t as much separation. My ultimate goal in theater is to change hearts and minds and make people more empathetic than when they walked in. Spectacle, when working in conjunction with emotional storytelling, has the greatest opportunity for change.

It still seems to me like it was an enormous risk to forgo an out-of-town tryout when your creative team is new to Broadway. 
Probably. But the fact that it was a first time for a lot of the people involved was why they were willing to take such a risk. They hadn’t been jaded by the system. They said, “This is what is right for this piece.” I think other people might’ve said, “Well, that’s not how we do things.” I’ve worked with other seasoned producers, and this isn’t disparaging at all, but they do say, “Well, this is how we do it.” The first question out of these producers’ mouths was always “What is right for our show?”

Are you thinking about how this production is not going to be able to tour as is?
It’s going to have to be different. Every show on tour has to be different. We knew from the beginning that we wanted to be in the Palace forever. We wanted to build it for the theater. With touring, it will need to change. It will have to be a big tour, which I’m excited about. The only big tours we have right now are Phantom and Wicked. Everything else has to fit in four trucks. Right now, we’re having to reconceive Maybe Happy Ending to load in six hours. How do we keep the excitement and the spectacle of Broadway while utilizing what’s possible on tour? Well, you get version 2.0 on tour. And then you’ve got to come see it in New York. It’s the flagship.

One well-documented and well-known part of the movie is its homoeroticism. What were the conversations about that like?
It was never something we talked about.

That’s interesting. It’s one of the major perceptions of the movie.
It was not something we dwelled upon. Vampires have always been homoerotic in nature. That’s baked into the fact that certain bodily fluids are involved. There’s also the idea that, if you have forever, you probably would want to taste the rainbow. Our show is about the redefinition of family, which makes it queer. And David is trying to build this family and sees in Michael parts of himself, and he wants to be his brother, his father, his lover, his friend, his comfort. Hopefully, what we’ve allowed in this production is for male love to be visible. But we didn’t say, “We need to make this gay.” Actually, the queer stuff …

Goes to Sam.
And in the movie, that is certainly “coded.”

It’s buried under a few more layers than it is here. 
It started when [composers] the Rescues wrote this song “Superpower.” In my mind, I was always like, “He’s got a poster of Rob Lowe, and he’s fashion forward.” But I still believe it is not about Sam being gay. He’s not interested in guys in the show or ashamed. He looks at the world differently. In one of the first scenes, Lucy says to him, “You’re a little bit queer,” but it’s in a different sense of the word.

But that’s a laugh line because we know it works both ways. 
He says, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.” In act two, his idiosyncratic OCD, attention to detail, and fashion nerdiness becomes what ultimately saves the day. Sam is the hero of the show. He figures it out. He says, “Maybe I can be a hero here / And make it cool to be queer.” He’s actually reclaiming the word in terms of it meaning “strange.” I think that’s so beautiful. But in that moment, he’s not like, “I’m a gay man,” at all.

I understand what you’re saying, but the lighting is rainbow.
We wanted it to work on two levels. The rainbow means a lot of different things to many people.

Sure.
I love that you took it that way. What we set out to do is to let it be a celebration for however you want to interpret that. Queerness is awesome in every sense of the word.

Can you tell me the story of why you called yourself a “faggot with a Tony” in your first Tony acceptance speech?
I was talking to one of my best friends, who is an incredible writer-musician who happens to be trans, and asking if she was going home for the holidays. She said, “I was going to go home and see my family, but they just passed these new laws and I don’t want to be arrested trying to pee somewhere.” I was so upset by that conversation, and I felt I had a responsibility to stand up for my friend at that moment. We always joke about that word faggot. Every time we hung out, she’d say, “Two faggots, one dress.” At the ceremony, I had one minute to say anything I wanted on national TV, and there was no way I was going to be able to thank all the people I needed to thank. I thought, When my little gay ass was in Midland, Texas, as a kid, where I didn’t feel safe or welcome, what would’ve meant the most to me? I was like, I have to say this for my friends and for the me that existed as a kid. I think my husband coined the phrase the day before. I was like, If I win, I’m going to say this.

It was an interesting moment of queer messiness on a broadcast that often feels like Broadway trying to fussily present its best self on national TV. What is your relationship like with mess?
That’s why we go to the theater. We go to see drama, we go to see things go wrong and to see people do things you don’t expect them to do. It’s like trigger warnings, right? I go to the theater to be triggered. I don’t want to go and feel comfortable. Stories that make me feel comfortable are a snooze. If honesty is discomforting, then maybe that’s a good thing.

And yet that’s a tension in your work. You’re a Broadway director. You’re not bouncing between smaller, riskier Off Broadway shows and big musicals, like a David Cromer. You are always speaking to a large, manicured audience. 
That’s just what has happened. I directed my first show, Spring Awakening, and it went to Broadway because somebody was like, “I want this to be on Broadway.” And then it’s like, “What are you going to do next?” I said, “I want to do Once on This Island.” It’s been an unexpected journey. I was an actor when I started directing. I got my friends together to do Spring Awakening and reused my furniture in a downtown-L.A. theater where there was a shooting every other day.

Now, I want to be able to make big things that many people can see, because people coming together and sitting peacefully and looking in the same direction is the antithesis to all the things I hate in the world. So yes, I have now fully bought into it. I want to do more big musicals. I can get a bunch of strangers to gather and have a shared experience where they look at the stage at people who are, upon first glance, disparate from them. Then by the end, they’re like, Oh, that’s me. Whether that’s a deaf person or a person in Haiti recovering from a storm or a Jewish man, that’s awesome. I want to make theater for the millions.

Listening to you talk about your first musicals, I was kind of struck by how they all centered marginalized communities. You had Deaf West Spring Awakening, the Caribbean culture in Once on This Island, and a Jewish man under attack in Parade. What did you learn from working on those shows?
There’s so much to culture that I don’t know. You have to walk into a situation saying, “Here’s my white flag. I know nothing. Help me help you tell your story, and let me put light on it.” I was drawn to those revivals because they went, “Here’s a story about this thing over here.” It was 1880s Germany after the Milan Conference on Deafness. Sometimes you need to travel far to get to yourself. People love Pixar movies because they’re able to actually see themselves in a talking animal toy more so than watching a person. We can be more emotionally affected when we think we’re looking through a telescope.

Late last year, there was a big controversy over Maybe Happy Ending casting Andrew Barth Feldman. How did you feel about that?
That was an interesting time. There were a lot of conversations that were really important that came out of that. I did a lot of reflecting on it. My job as a director is to realize the vision of the writer in some way and to take the audience on a journey where they hopefully forget about where they are. Having worked on that show forever, our first cast was a white Oliver and a Black Claire.

That was a workshop?
Our first workshop was that. It was always the writers’ intent for those robots to be played by anyone. I’m there to help achieve their vision. It was hard to see people be hurt by something, where the intention of the creators wasn’t to hurt, but it was clearly a real thing. What’s interesting is what happens with art when people feel ownership of a piece. Ultimately, it begs the question, Can you tell artists what art they can make?

Listen, it was very hard at the time, but I’m so glad that we went through it. Thousands upon thousands of people got to see Andrew Barth Feldman be incredible in Maybe Happy Ending. He was phenomenal. He’s one of my favorite actors. Currently on Broadway, one of our standbys, who will hopefully play Claire one day, is a Black actor named Savy Jackson. There’s a way of acknowledging how people have supported the show and taken ownership of the show, while also remaining true to the ultimate goal of the show, which is for the casting to be inclusive. There are Korean characters who will always need to be played by Korean actors. But in terms of the robots, I think we want as many people to be inspired and see themselves in this world as possible.

You never put out a statement when the cast and creatives were coming under heavy criticism. Why was that?
I never felt it was helpful for me to speak at that moment. Certainly, that was the advice that I was given by my representative. If people are going to be upset, me saying something isn’t going to change how they feel. The best thing I can do is in my work, as I have tried to do my entire career — to create as many diverse opportunities as possible. I had Alex Newell play the Mother of the Earth! I ask, “What can I do that isn’t necessarily reactionary, but is proactive in casting and can broaden opportunities for communities?” Ultimately, I stand behind everything.

When you look back at your other musical this season, Queen of Versailles, what do you feel?
That show is really great. Listen, it was not without its problems. However, it was incredibly unique. I’ve never seen anything tackle the subject matter that particular show did. I’m really proud of the production and what we did visually and what Kristin did and what Sherie did when she went on.

We did the show in Boston before Trump was reelected, and there was a willingness to buy into satire in a way that, once he was reelected, people were not there to laugh anymore. I remember being in previews, maybe, when the assassination attempt occurred, and thinking, Oh, man, I wonder how this is all going to play. We never wanted it to be a goofy send-up making fun of these people, because that felt completely uninteresting to me. We were trying to smartly and honestly show these people and use the French court as a foil to examine the deep, problematic nature of wealth and these people. I think we did that. When the show opened, we were in Trump 2.0 and people didn’t want to even entertain looking at the wealthy Republicans, especially in the theatergoing community. Then there was the internet shit storm that was the Charlie Kirk thing, and people didn’t actually look at it for what it was. They were looking at it through several lenses. I wonder if the show had opened this month, how it would be received. [This interview occurred before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting.]

I think that there will probably be some amazing revival someday and people will say it’s amazing.

Did you try to pivot during previews when you sensed that the audience was not receptive? 
You are also dealing with a true story. What are we going to do? Put her in prison at the end? That would be much less interesting than it being a cautionary tale. We just tried to tell the story truthfully and make it as entertaining and surgically interesting as possible.

Before Queen of Versailles, you had won two Tonys in three years and every show of yours was received rapturously. What was it like to experience this kind of rejection?
Well, it sucked. It was terrible for everybody. People’s livelihoods depend on this, as does mine. If the show isn’t running, I don’t get paid either. It was really hard. A lot of people who were passing judgment on it didn’t actually see it. They were just piling on the fun thing to hate, which is unfortunately a big problem in the industry and in the theater community, if that is a real thing.

What do you mean by “the theater community, if that is a real thing”?
The theater community loves to hate on or make fun of something, and it’s just because it’s drama kids. With Spider-Man, nobody said, “How unfortunate; think of all the people that have put so much work into it.” They were like, “Oh, this is a fucking shit storm.” That is always going to be more fun.

Did you feel like a bigger target?
I was just trying to do my work. I don’t really care what people … No one sets out trying to make a bad piece of art. Making a musical is the hardest thing in the world because it involves collaboration with so many people. I love the art form. I’m going to keep trying to make good things.

You’re working on Happy Feet and The Interestings. Is that all that’s been confirmed?
I’m also working on a thing called West that will be confirmed soon. I describe it like I’m preparing a never-ending meal, and different dishes take a different amount of time and are ready at different times. I started working on Lost Boys before I knew I was going to do Parade. I have other shows that I’m doing before I do The Interestings that haven’t even been announced yet.

When people look back on your career, how do you want them to see you?
I would like to be an example of a balance between great risk and great respect for the audience. I’m doing things differently but also still providing entertainment. I’m taking risks and hopefully being cutting edge but also still giving people just a great fucking time. It’s balancing art and commerce in a way where both are possible. Both are important for the longevity of the art form.