Inside The Lost Boys Broadway Musical: How The Rescues Created the ’80s-Inspired Score

”It's like making it to Oz,” says Kyler England of the L.A.-based indie rock band The Rescues. She is, of course, talking about Broadway. She and her two band-mates, Gabriel Mann and Adrianne "AG" Gonzalez, are behind the music and lyrics for The Lost Boys, A New Musical. The trio sat down with Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek to discuss how they got involved with the production, their creative process and how the experience helped them grow as a band.

The Rescues began working together not by choice but by force. England and AG met at Berklee College of Music in Boston, later switching coasts and moving to L.A. Mann already lived in L.A., and the three knew each other through their respective solo projects in the SoCal music scene. It wasn’t until England’s friend, an industry insider, pushed the three to play together at his wedding reception that they finally realized they’d struck gold. “It was just instant chemistry and because he was in the music industry, there were managers and labels there and they wanted to then see us showcase, which was hilarious because we'd all been trying to get record deals for years,” England says. “Suddenly it was a boulder rolling down a mountain that you couldn't stop.”

By forming the band, an important lesson in saying yes was learned. So when the opportunity to write the score for The Lost Boys came about, the answer was obvious. What wasn’t obvious was how much work writing a musical would be. “I'm actually really happy that we didn't know. It would have been harder to say yes, had we known what a commitment it would be,” AG says. “I think we still would have said yes, but it was nice sort of being in the dark about that.”

Director Michael Arden, a fan of the band, had an instinct that The Rescues should be the ones to pen the music and lyrics. Between the pulse-pounding epics, comical blips and ‘80s-style pop songs, the sonic landscape of The Lost Boys carries quite a variety. Despite being written for a vampire musical, each song finds a way of being deeply moving and personal to The Rescues’ own lives. “These are things that The Rescues, as a band, we've explored before this,” Mann says. “I think that was part of the reason that Arden was attracted to us, like, ‘They have all these things that we're going to need for this show.’”

Even with an impressive catalogue under their belts, The Rescues had their work cut out for them. Over the course of five years, the band wrote 50 original songs for The Lost Boys. The typical Broadway musical has about 20 songs total. Using the medium of musical theater to create proved to be helpful for The Rescues in their songwriting. “I think a song can really come alive in the context of a story in a musical, in a way that it can't on an album,” England says. An album can have a concept, sure, but it’s often much more open-ended. Equipped with a set story and character arcs, The Rescues morphed their process. “The way we approached our album songwriting was more like impressionistic painting,” England continues. “Broad strokes. You stand back and everyone can see themselves in it. But the specificity of a story on stage and the way a song can animate a character's story is incredibly powerful, and I'm hooked on it.”

For Mann, who has composed for television shows like Modern Family, Emily in Paris and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, it was the crafting of the music that really spoke to him. “I personally am attracted to the compositional aspect of it, using thematic material for specific reasons in specific places,” he says. “To make something that consists of a bunch of songs that are interconnected in some way, that is wonderful and it's something that we never even considered making our own records. It's pretty fascinating.”

The finale song, “If We Make it Through the Night,” was not the original closing number. The first was scrapped, and The Rescues’ love for the replacement seems to be flowing out of them. AG and Mann turned to England to explain the heart of the song: “Vampires always make it through the night, right? We humans don't. That is the essential nature of being human, is the if. The beautiful brutality of being a human is that nothing is guaranteed.” Strategically placed at the end of the show, the band believes it will spur deeper questions that resonate with the show’s core. “After you make it through a terrible struggle, you have the chance to think about, who do I want to be? How do I want to love? What do I want to do with the time that I have, this day that I have—which is all that I know that I have right now?”

That song and the experience in general has prompted the band to reflect on their time on Earth and the happiness this process has brought them. “As we've been crafting the stories of all these characters and their arcs and everything they learn, we've been on these hero's journeys as well,” England says. “We've grown so much individually and as a band, and staying open to what this moment can be for us, it’s so freaking beautiful.” For AG, the process has been a gift. “I didn’t realize how much I needed this,” she says. “I can't believe that we get to do this in our lives, like at all. Believe me, we've worked our asses off, but even with that, none of this is ever guaranteed.”

Before The Lost Boys, life for The Rescues was fine. “But fine is not what life is about,” AG says. The Rescues, you could say, were rescued by the healing power of musical theater. “To be a big part of the foundation of what made this thing, it feels overwhelming,” Mann says. “It's exciting. It also is something that is ultimately not ours. It gets delivered and then it lives, hopefully for a long time, and we can share it with everyone.” Well, vampires are famously immortal.

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