Michael Arden Catches a Flight
The theatre director Michael Arden has a phobia of hand injuries and of flying, but you wouldn’t have known it when he showed up at iFLY, an indoor-skydiving facility in Queens, the other day. Indoor skydiving involves lying prone in a vertical wind tunnel. “I was telling people at work that my biggest fear is just that I go in the tube and it doesn’t work,” Arden said while signing a safety waiver. His latest show, “The Lost Boys,” which was nominated for twelve Tonys, subjects its actors to a half-dozen intricate flying sequences, including a period of dangling upside down about forty feet above the stage. The skydiving would serve as a kind of “I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do” directing tactic.
Flying on Broadway is often scary. A missed mark can mean a splat. “Like, inches,” Arden said. “The other night, L.J.”—L. J. Benet, who plays the teen-age protagonist and maybe-vampire Michael—“was off his mark, and he flew up as a platform came down, and he bumped into it. He was O.K. But it’s something we really want to avoid.” Flying can also be scary for investors. In “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark,” which premièred in 2011, the actors kept getting injured or stuck in midair. (In the first preview, Spider-Man was left suspended above the audience, and a crewmember tried to nudge him loose with a stick, “like a live Spider-Man piñata,” the musical’s co-writer said later.) The show reportedly lost about sixty million dollars. “I did see ‘Spider-Man,’ ” Arden said. “The issue with ‘Spider-Man’ was—how do I say this? It just wasn’t a good musical.”
Arden began working on “Lost Boys” before he won Tony Awards for “Parade” and “Maybe Happy Ending.” He hadn’t seen the 1987 film version with Kiefer Sutherland, Dianne Wiest, and Jason Patric, and, when he watched it, he found himself surprisingly moved by the familial bonds. “Also, everybody was, like, the hottest they’ve ever been,” he said. In the musical, he emphasizes nontraditional families. “I was raised mostly by my dad’s parents,” he said. This was Midland, Texas, in the eighties and nineties. “I was an only grandchild. I had lots of time for a strange imagination, and I would build stages in my garage and light them. I would explain what was happening in the play, but I wouldn’t do the play because I didn’t have any actors.”
He and the crew designed the flying sequences in Las Vegas, with the company Flying by Foy. “They did the O.G. ‘Peter Pan,’ ” in 1954, Arden said. “Their technology has gotten better. It was probably originally a guy with a rope.” During the show, the stage manager monitors everything on a night-vision camera from above the stage, and a camouflaged stagehand helps with the harnesses. “It’s literally a carpenter in a velvet ninja suit,” Arden said. “If you watch it in infrared, it’s crazy.”
It was time to fly. Arden, who wore a plaid jacket and laceless black sneakers, headed to the flying area. In the giant tube, an instructor was doing flips. “It’s like Willy Wonka,” Arden said.
The flying coach, Will, introduced himself. “I’ve done about eleven hundred jumps in the past three years, so I know a little bit about this,” he said. “Big question right off the rip: Any previous shoulder injuries?”
Will helped Arden into a red flying onesie, and he advised him to switch to laced shoes. “That’s fourteen hundred horsepower,” Will said, pointing at the tube. “I blew my Vans off a few weeks ago. One went through the return vane and came back in about a hundred pieces.”
Will told Arden that he should lie flat, like a starfish. “All we’re doing is trust-falling into the wind,” he said. “Slow movements.”
“Our mantra at work is ‘Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,’ ” Arden said.
Will slipped a helmet onto Arden’s head and said, “These are hurricane-force winds. How are you feeling? Nervous?”
“Excited!” Arden said.
“Excited-nervous?” Will said.
“Just excited.”
“A little nerves is O.K.!”
Arden entered the tube and caught the wind. Will kept hold of him, and, eventually, he flew him up toward the top.
Emerging, Arden said, “I didn’t expect that we were going up right away. I was, like, ‘Oh, shit!’ ” After a rest, Arden went in again, and Will showed him how he could turn just by angling his hands. He spun around like a helicopter rotor.
In his acceptance speech for his first Tony, in 2023, Arden recounted being a bullied queer theatre kid in Texas, and then said, “All I can say is that now I’m a faggot with a Tony.” Post-flying, Arden said, “I was more nervous making that speech. That was terrifying.” ♦