How Dane Laffrey Crafted Broadway’s Flying Vampire Sets for ‘The Lost Boys’

When designing sets for a musical populated by flying vampires, scenic designer Dane Laffrey must think in three dimensions. But Laffrey, a Tony Award winner, is no stranger to bold challenges.

Over decades in theater, he has crafted some of Broadway’s most unforgettable sets, from the 360-degree Caribbean archipelago of the 2017 Once on This Island revival to the futuristic South Korea of 2024’s Maybe Happy Ending. Now, his designs for The Lost Boys—a dynamic musical that opened last month at Broadway’s Palace Theatre—are soaring to new heights, and depths, in ways that defy expectations.

Dane Laffrey [Photo: Matthew Murphy]

The Lost Boys is based on the 1980s cult film about undead teenagers terrorizing a California beach town. The musical demands a dizzying array of locations: a seedy arcade, a crumbling boardwalk, a sunken mosh pit, a towering railroad trestle, and a postindustrial underground lair where vampires claim their victims—complete with a working elevator.

In the vast space of the Palace Theatre, one of Broadway’s largest venues, Laffrey’s set astounds by transforming into these locations seamlessly. It offers actors multiple performance levels for action-packed sequences and vanishes entirely when needed to allow for aerial stunts. Audiences may hold their breath, waiting to see if performers land safely, but Laffrey’s precision-engineered set pieces always align perfectly.

The result is an experience that feels both intense and indescribable—a deliberate choice by Laffrey. “Hopefully, it feels boundless in a good way,” he told Fast Company from his Hell’s Kitchen office. “One of the things we’ve tried to do is make the audience unaware of the boundaries of the space. You can’t quite tell where the theater begins and the set ends, or where anything goes, or quite how big anything is.”

For Laffrey, the set design of The Lost Boys treats the story’s central location—the rustic Emerson family home—as a vital “character.” “It’s a metaphor for the thing that everybody in the story is yearning for,” he explained. “They’re yearning to belong. They’re yearning for a home.”

As the musical follows the film’s key beats, the house had to support pivotal scenes, from intimate family moments to a climactic vampire hunt with elaborate effects. Laffrey designed it with multiple levels, rooms, and moving parts. Yet, it also had to vanish rapidly to transition to other settings.

“We needed to be able to explode out onto the Santa