The towering sets for Broadway’s ‘The Lost Boys’ have audiences gasping. Here’s how the designer pulled it off

When you’re building sets for a musical that’s populated by flying vampires, you have to challenge yourself to think three-dimensionally. But Dane Laffrey is used to challenging himself. Over the course of his decades-long career in theater, the Tony-winning scenic designer has been tasked with bringing to life some of the most memorable sets in recent Broadway history—from a sandy, 360-degree Caribbean archipelago for the 2017 revival of Once on This Island to the futuristic South Korea setting of 2024’s Maybe Happy Ending. Now Laffrey’s set designs are literally soaring to new heights—while also sinking to new depths—in The Lost Boys, a dynamic and at times acrobatic musical that opened last month at Broadway’s Palace Theatre. Dane Laffrey [Photo: Matthew Murphy] Based on the 1980s movie about undead teenagers running amok in a California beach town, the musical demanded a head-spinning array of disparate locations: for starters, a seedy arcade, a washed-up boardwalk, a sunken-in mosh pit, a towering railroad trestle, and a postindustrial underground lair where the vampires claim their victims—complete with its own working elevator. In the vast expanse of the Palace, one of the biggest houses on Broadway, Laffrey’s work astounds as it morphs into all these locations in service of the fast-paced story, sometimes offering the actors multiple levels on which to perform their action-packed sequences, and other times moving out of the way completely so they can take flight. You may find yourself anxiously holding your breath as you wait to see if everyone lands on cue, and fortunately, Laffrey’s Rubik’s Cube-like set pieces always slide into their proper place at just the right time. Taken in as a whole, the experience is at once intense and hard to describe, which is the point. “Hopefully, it feels boundless in a good way,” Laffrey tells Fast Company in an interview from his office in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. “One of the things we’ve tried to do is make