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.”
Wilson’s pitch for the show has always been demographic before it was musical. “I wanted the show to feel eclectic,” Wilson says after the show. “We wanted the show to hit every demographic: Male, female, [every color] of skin, sexual orientation, all of it. And so we wanted to find ownership, investors, marketers that really spoke to the wide reach, because we always felt like the show was different from a standard Broadway show.” So he went through the Rolodex and landed on a hunch. “I bet Slash loves this movie. I just had this feeling, because I knew he was a horror guy.”
“He’s such a great actor, so it’s sort of an honor knowing him,” Slash adds. “When I first met him I was a little bit starstruck, because I thought he was great in ‘The Conjuring.’ He just did ‘Cape Fear,’ which he was phenomenal at. So I try not to shower him with compliments.”
What sold him, he says, was what the stage version found in the material that the film had left alone. “I loved that [the adaptation] addresses kids who have been abandoned by a parent and what they go through, and how they have to learn to adapt. Some kids have problems and people don’t know what’s behind. The majority of kids have troubled backgrounds in some way, shape or form.” The movie, he says, “was more like a crazy love triangle, and it had that rock ‘n’ roll element to it, and it was fun. But in the stage production, there’s a lot more storytelling.”
If a rock guitarist crying at a Broadway show sounds unlikely, consider where he first learned the form. In the mid-1970s, Slash’s mother, the costume designer Ola Hudson, worked on the American production of The Rocky Horror Show, whose Frank-N-Furter is the unmistakable touchstone of Bourzgui’s David, down to the depraved purr.
“My mom did Rocky Horror when I was a kid, so I was around for that. I was just hanging out, being a nuisance,” he says. “She was doing makeup and clothes for that so I saw that every night for a long time. She did Jesus Christ Superstar, so I was there for that … I was a big Tommy fan, and [loved] when they turned that into a play.” Hudson died in 2009. “She would have loved [watching tonight],” Slash says. “She loved this stuff. She would have dug it.”
On Thursday, the nuisance from the wings was the one being gawked at by a cast young enough to be his kids — a detail Wilson clocked from backstage. “They all were geeking out on that stage, which I was too.” he says. “It just shows the reach of one, his music; two, of really that band; but really of [Slash]. The greatest living guitarist of all time.”
Click here to read the full article.
