Slash Talks Shredding With Broadway’s Vampires in ‘The Lost Boys

On Wednesday night, Slash played songs from 1987 to a stadium crowd in New Jersey. Roughly 20 hours later, he walked onto a different stage and it was 1987 again — this time on purpose.

The occasion was The Lost Boys , the Tony-winning musical adaptation of Joel Schumacher's vampire comedy, which opened in theaters 10 days after Appetite for Destruction. Onstage, the show's Santa Carla boardwalk glowed in neon; the ensemble worked crimped hair, leather trenches, fishnets and biker boots. In that light, the timing felt less like coincidence than homage.

Slash appeared early, during the rousing rock-club scene in which the show's vampire band tears into "Have to Have You." (Duff McKagan watched from the audience.) He stepped out beside David — the Billy Idol-coiffed, Billy Squier-strutting bloodsucker played by Ali Louis Bourzgui, who won a Tony for the role in June. "That literally felt like being in the center of a real rock concert," Bourzgui tells Rolling Stone . "Slash came out and immediately started shredding — the whole audience got on their feet and stayed up till the end. The whole cast and I started running off the energy and adrenaline and performed that song as hard as we ever have." Slash played the solo on the studio version of "Have to Have You," released as the show's first single last October. But Thursday was his first time running it live alongside the actor-musicians. The appearance, billed as one night only, was his Broadway debut. He is also a producer and investor in the show, recruited by his friend Patrick Wilson, a lead producer alongside his college roommates and fellow Guns N' Roses diehards James Carpinello and Marcus Chait.

"The only thing I've done that reminds me of this is when I performed ['I'm Just Ken'] with Ryan Gosling at the Academy Awards," Slash tells Rolling Stone a few hours before curtain, having just rehearsed with the cast for the first time. He had seen the finished show exactly once, on Tuesday, from a seat in the audience. "I was sort of embarrassed," he says. "I've been involved with this thing since the beginning. I wasn't here for the preview. I wasn't here for any of it, because I've been on the road." He was not prepared for how hard the score would land. "The songs are really powerful," he says. "I got choked up a couple times, and that's really sort of a rarity for me. And there was nothing I could do about it. It just got me by the throat." One of the numbers that undid him was "Belong to Someone," a ballad about wanting a place to land. "You just have to experience it and you'll understand," he says. The emotional intensity rivaled the stagecraft: "The special effects that they put together to pull off some of the iconic scenes from the movie are unbelievable. The motorcycle scene is one in particular. I was really like, how are they going to do this? I never saw rehearsal tape for this particular part, so when they got into it, that sort of blew my mind." Producing horror is not new territory. Slash has backed a run of genre films through his companies Slasher Films and Berserkergang, and this fall he is scoring 'Killceañera,' a haunted house at Universal Studios Hollywood's Halloween Horror Nights. Producing a musical was another matter. "You have that spontaneous live thing, which is what rock and roll is all about, so I can relate to that," he says. "But then you do have a big ensemble cast, and you have a lot of people in production, and there's certain elements that don't exist in a movie."

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