As the title character of The Who’s Tommy in its 2024 Broadway revival, Ali Louis Bourzgui sang the show’s most famous refrain: “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.” That production ran for a too-short four months, but Bourzgui’s haunting voice and magnetic presence left a lasting impression. And two years later, those words he sang as Tommy encapsulate oddly well the ethos — both spoken and not — of his latest role.
As David — the vampire rock star of The Lost Boys, the new musical based on the ‘80s cult-favorite movie of the same name — Bourzgui has to believably telegraph both seductive danger and deep hurt, while often flying high above the stage (and rocking one of the more memorable wigs ever seen on Broadway). The role was made famous in the film by a young Kiefer Sutherland, but Bourzgui imbues it fully with his own charisma — a performance that earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical.
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“You get auditions sent to you, and most of them, you’re kind of like, ‘This is cool, I can’t really get a grasp of the vibe of this show, but I’ll audition.’ And every once in a while, something comes through where you just feel it tangibly, even through an email,” Bourzgui recalls of first hearing about The Lost Boys. “I saw this initial packet, and I got so excited — like more excited than I’ve been for an audition maybe ever.”
Much of that had to do with meeting Tony-winning director Michael Arden and hearing demos by The Rescues, the Los Angeles indie band who wrote music and lyrics for the Lost Boys (“I was like oh, these songs are f—ing cool”). But the character of David himself was, Bourzugui says, “so well-written from the start.” Overall, he was struck by how The Lost Boys, despite its big show intentions (and budget), felt like something more intimate, built from the ground up — a feeling that the production ultimately preserves even in the uniquely cavernous space of Broadway’s Palace Theater.
With traces of glitter still on his face from the day’s matinee, Bourzgui (who is himself a singer/songwriter) spoke to Billboard from his dressing room before a much-needed physical therapy session about how to play a non-cliché vampire, his rock star inspirations, and embracing his own unique voice.
Movie-to-musical adaptations are popular these days, but it’s rare that they actually work well — and this is one of those rare ones that feels natural onstage. Did you get that sense from the beginning?
Yeah, and I also don’t think I necessarily would have sprung for it if it felt like a generic movie remake, because that’s not the kind of thing I want to be doing. I’ve always kind of been one of those audience members who’s been a little “harrumph” about everything being a movie musical, everything coming from [pre-existent] IP; I am an absolute supporter of completely original work, so that’s what I usually dive towards. But I could tell that this was that, still, somehow. And it’s only proven to be true, and I think it’s also why people are connected to it. [The creative team] never set out to do a remake. It’s not a jukebox musical; if we just used the movie’s soundtrack — all those songs are great, I listen to that album all the time, but they wouldn’t move the plot forward. We didn’t really do anything that’s like copy-paste; the whole thing is in many ways an original work.
It manages to preserve that scrappy “let’s put on a show together” feeling…
There’s a lot of newbies in the room, and I mean that in a positive way. The Rescues were brand-new to this, and so their music was just a true labor of love — they had no jadedness. Apparently they wrote, like, 50 songs for this thing before we got started! And [book co-writer] Chris Hoch is no stranger to the stage, but [book co-writer] David Hornsby is a TV writer, and so for him coming into the theater world and bringing that sort of TV writing sense did so much for this too. Dean Maupin, our drummer, he’s a model and a musician, and he was like, “I kind of want to get into acting,” and all of a sudden his first thing is this Broadway show! We all feel comfortable in this space, because no one has set up any kind of a thing where people have to feel bad for being new at all.
You have this really unique voice, and thus far in your career it seems like you’ve had the luck of getting to do these non-traditional musicals — in addition to Tommy, you recently played Orpheus in Hadestown and got to do the new musical We Live in Cairo at New York Theater Workshop, where Rent originated. Before you got to Broadway, did you want a more traditional career — or was it always your aim to do something different?
I’m not unaware of how crazy lucky I am, for, like you said, having done this many cool things in such a short amount of time. I’ve always been drawn to new work, and I also have always written my own music, but I think I did get lucky falling in these rooms that were pushing these boundaries. I also think playing guitar kind of got me in some of these places too. I got to do Hadestown — and in all three of these shows, part of my audition process was being able to play guitar. I’ve always wanted to be a character actor, but that sometimes comes as being a secondary [role], so it’s been nice to play some sort of leading roles where I also get to be a chameleon.
Bourzgui (right) with LJ Benet in ‘The Lost Boys.’ (Photo credit: Matthew Murphy)Did elements of playing Orpheus and Tommy prepare you to do David?
With both of those shows, I needed to learn what my voice was, because, like you said, it is a little different. I was hard on myself in college, because I wanted to sound like the people I heard on Broadway who were making it, and that was such a very clean sound, and I always had a bit of a rasp, which now I like because it’s great for rock, but I always had a different timbre and was trying to morph it into something else. [But] the minute I started leaning into it, that’s when I started getting jobs.
Tommy and Orpheus were both huge vocal lifts, so I learned how to work on stamina and how to protect my instrument. In this show I’m singing a lot of rock but also screaming and trying to be scary. I also think it was really nice to play Orpheus before David, because they are so different, but I think what makes David effective is having an Orpheus inside of him, like a Russian doll — like, this sweet little boy who wants to fix the world, but somewhere along the way he got really f—ed up.
Much has been made of your excellent wig, but I’m equally interested in what it’s like to sing with vampire teeth — I’d imagine it’s a complicated saliva situation?
The teeth are interesting. It’s actually not that hard at all — they’re like Invisalign, they just click in. It’s a mock of my actual teeth, and then they cut out the back plastic, so I can just have the fangs and sound normal. The saliva thing is an aspect… I’ve been usually okay, but there have been a few times, like right after the first time I wear them, I fly up into the air where I’m singing, and there’s literal drool hanging down. [Laughs]
Movement — the flying of course, but also just how you carry yourself — also feels like a huge aspect of how you’ve built this character…
100%, I wanted to go in and make the vampire of it all not cliché or cheesy. So I thought that it would be effective to really figure out what [David’s] body was like — I think he’s technically over 100 years old, or at least in his late 90s. What would it be like for someone like that to be in the body of a 20-year-old, and when does that wax and wane? A lot of the show, I’m really fast, and I’ll do something kind of athletic, and then there are moments when I think he lets the weight of the world slip in on him, and he kind of remembers everything he’s been through in the past century. The whole rock star thing is a character to him, so that he can disassociate from his truth. I’ve also played with the movement pattern of him being like a snake — this sort of slithery thing. All those little touchstones help me make this a real guy with layers.
Are there particular people who you’re channeling in your portrayal of David too?
I would say the three main people I’m drawing inspiration from are Tim Curry, David Bowie and Sam Reed, who plays Lestat on the Interview With The Vampire TV show right now. Especially David Bowie in Labyrinth, where it’s a little weird, and you’re like, “What is this guy doing? This is crazy,” but there’s also kind of a connection to gender queerness too.
After seeing you in Tommy, my first thought was actually that you gave me major young Tim Curry vibes! Would you do Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror?
Tim Curry has always been a huge, huge, huge inspiration for me, 100%. I would love to do that part for sure.
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