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[title]The Rescues are no strangers to making music, but in building a Broadway musical versus recording an album, the indie rock trio learned that one of the biggest differences is time.
“The two things can’t be compared,” says band member Gabriel Mann. It takes about six months to make an album, bandmate Adrianne Gonzalez says, but six years to make a musical. Kyler England, the Rescues’ third member, sums up the process: “Writing a musical takes an immense amount of humility.” That humility has paid off. Their first Broadway show, The Lost Boys, is nominated for 12 Tony Awards—including two for the Rescues: Best Score and (with Ethan Popp) Best Orchestrations.
After forming in 2008, the Rescues built an audience in Los Angeles and then globally. One Tree Hill, Pretty Little Liars and Grey’s Anatomy featured their songs, which Pentatonix also covered. The band’s tight harmonies and full-hearted music caught Michael Arden’s ear: As director of The Lost Boys, he enlisted the trio to venture into new territory and create a stage musical of the 1987 cult film.
Now, Gonzalez, England and Mann are looking forward to Sunday’s Tony Awards ceremony and reflecting on their journey of making vampires and mortals sing in Arden’s spectacular production. Through all the visions and revisions, the band members have kept one truth in mind: “We all need to be telling the same story,” says Mann.
“An album is a collection of songs that may or may not have anything to do with each other,” Mann notes. With a musical, by contrast, “there’s collaboration between the composer and bookwriter and director and producer and Warner Brothers and this preexisting IP.” And collaboration with each other, too: Amiable and equipped with yes-and energy, the band members don’t finish each other’s sentences so much as see each one as a fresh idea to build on.
“I remember one particular day when Adrianne brought in, like, four different song ideas,” Mann says of developing “Murder Capital of the World,” an early number in The Lost Boys. “She was like, ‘What about this? What about this? What about this?’ It took my brain some time to accept that this was gonna be how this process was; I was like, ‘Wait, this is too fast, too much information.’” (“That’s my whole vibe,” Gonzalez wryly adds.)
Originally, the finale of The Lost Boys finale was not the stirring “If We Make it Through the Night” but another number that “somebody said was like answering a question no one was asking,” Mann says. “It was brutal,” England says. “Brutal,” echoes Gonzalez.
Such is the see-what-works experiment of musical theater development, a process that “we have fallen in love with,” England says. “We wrote maybe 50 to 60 songs total, and there’s only 20-something songs and reprises in the musical.” “Only,” Mann says with a laugh.
The Lost Boys explores young love, a catalyst for countless musical theater anthems and a genre right in the Rescues’ sweet spot. “I think there is something about the music the three of us write together that, for some reason, tells the story of the plight of the young person,” Gonzalez says. “The sort of everything-is-everything, life-or-death-feeling.” A life-or-death attitude is apt for a show about vampires and the mortals they hunt. But in crafting a musical, the Rescues also saw a chance to create songs that the recording industry doesn’t always highlight: ones that musicalize the emotions of older people, particularly mothers.
While The Lost Boys features a cast of rising Broadway talents, the musical also features theater stalwarts, like Soshana Bean, who is Tony-nominated for her role as a mother looking for a fresh start. In her showstopping number “Wild,” she yearns for a way back to her freer self while also celebrating her motherhood, “What if my boys can mean the world to me,” she asks, “and I can matter too?”
“Writing that was a very powerful experience because we’re all parents,” England says. “In the music industry, pop songs paint with broader strokes, so the level of detail you get to explore in musical theater is really rewarding. I’m hooked on it.” The Lost Boys has encouraged the Rescues to unlock songs they weren’t sure they could write. “It is nice to be new at something,” Mann says. “Every day of this has been the first day that we had that experience, so that’s been all the things: humbling, fascinating, exciting. We feel invigorated by that experience; we’ll never have that again.”
England is appreciating how finely aligned each production element must be for a show to truly sing. “Michael Arden said this recently: A musical is only working when everything is working in concert. I’m gonna deeply miss all the humans we were so lucky to work with.” The band sees The Lost Boys as a jumping off point: a chance to harness lessons for possible future shows. “We’ve been changed by this, and we saw the fruits of our labor,” Gonzalez says. “It would be a shame to not take these lessons and be better the next time. That’s one of the most exciting things.”
The band has several ideas for other projects bouncing around. (“We love a challenge,” England says.) Meanwhile, they look forward to celebrating the Tony Awards on Sunday—an honor they did not see coming and that’s afforded them a deeper appreciation of their peers’ work. “I know all the musicals have had the same experience in different ways, so it’s a big celebration,” Mann says. “We’ve shared this experience with them, and we’ve all met them over the last few months. That’s a pretty powerful and beautiful thing.”
“It’s really meaningful to see people get up and thank those who are part of their journey,” England says. “We need waterproof mascara.”