Thursday night, Slash made his Broadway debut: the Guns N’ Roses guitarist took the stage for a solo in The Lost Boysthe vampire musical comedy adapted from the film by Joel Schumacher and crowned at the Tony Awards. The day before, he played in a stadium in New Jersey. Producer and investor of the show, recruited by his friend the actor Patrick Wilson, he tells WECB a score that “caught him by the throat”.
On Wednesday night, Slash played songs from 1987 in front of a stadium in New Jersey. About twenty hours later, he went on a completely different stage, and it was 1987 again. This time, it was intentional.
The opportunity: The Lost Boysthe Tony Award-winning musical adaptation of Joel Schumacher’s vampire comedy (Lost Generation in France), a film released in theaters ten days later Appetite for Destruction. On stage, the Santa Carla promenade shone with neon lights; the troupe sported backcombed hair, leather trench coats, fishnets and biker boots. In this light, the timing coincidence seemed less like a coincidence than a tribute.
Slash appeared early, during the wild rock-club scene where the show’s vampire band bursts into “Have to Have You.” (Duff McKagan watched from the audience.) He appeared alongside David, the bloodsucker with the Billy Idol hairdo and Billy Squier walk played by Ali Louis Bourzgui, who won a Tony for the role in June.
Slash had signed the solo for the studio version of “Have to Have You”, released last October as the first single from the show. But Thursday was the first time he performed it live alongside the actor-musicians. The appearance, billed as a one-off, was her Broadway debut. He is also a producer and investor in the show, recruited by his friend Patrick Wilson, lead producer with his former college roommates, absolute Guns N’ Roses fans, James Carpinello and Marcus Chait.
He didn’t expect to be hit so hard by the score. “The songs are really powerful. I had a tight throat two or three times, and that’s really rare for me. And I couldn’t do anything about it. It simply caught me by the throat. » One of the numbers that floored him was “Belong to Someone,” a ballad about the need for a home base. “You have to live it, and you will understand. »
The emotional intensity rivaled the stage machinery: “The special effects they put together to reproduce certain cult scenes from the film are incredible. The motorcycle scene, in particular. I was really wondering: how are they going to do this? I had never seen rehearsal footage of this exact passage, so when they started doing it, it blew me away. »
Producing horror is nothing new for him. Slash has supported a string of genre films through his companies Slasher Films and Berserkergang, and this fall he is composing music for Killceañera, a haunted house at Universal Studios Hollywood’s Halloween Horror Nights. Producing a musical was something else. “There is this spontaneous side of live, which is the very essence of rock’n’roll, so I relate to it. But there is also a large cast, a lot of people in production, and certain elements that don’t exist in a film. »
Wilson’s talk on the show has always been demographic before being musical. “I wanted the show to be eclectic”explains Wilson after the performance. “We wanted it to reach all audiences: men, women, all skin colors, all sexual orientations, everything. So we wanted to find co-producers, investors, marketers who really speak to this broad audience, because we always felt that this show was different from a typical Broadway show. » So he went through his address book and followed an intuition. “I bet Slash loves this movie. I had a feeling about it, because I knew he was a horror buff. »
What convinced him, he says, was what the stage version found in the material that the film had left out. “I loved that (the adaptation) was about children being abandoned by a parent, what they go through and how they have to learn to adapt. Some kids have problems and people don’t know what’s behind them. Most kids have a rough past in one way or another. » The film, he said, “It was more of a crazy love triangle, with this rock’n’roll side, and it was fun. But in the stage production, there is much more of a story. »
If the image of a tearful rock guitarist on Broadway seems improbable, we have to remember where he discovered the genre. In the mid-1970s, Slash’s mother, costume designer Ola Hudson, worked on the American production of The Rocky Horror Showwhose Frank-N-Furter is the obvious reference to Bourzgui’s David, right down to the depraved purr. “My mother made Rocky Horror when I was a kid, so I was around. I was hanging around, acting like a nuisance. She did the makeup and costumes, so I saw that every night for a long time. She did Jesus Christ Superstarso I was there too… I was a big fan of Tommyand (I loved it) when they made a play out of it. » Hudson died in 2009. “She would have loved (to see it tonight). She loved it all. She would have loved it. »
On Thursday, the old pest was the one being devoured with eyes by a troupe young enough to be his children, a detail Wilson noted from the sidelines. “They were all in awe on that stage, and so was I. It shows the scope, one, of his music, two, of this group, but especially of (Slash). The greatest living guitarist of all time. »
