When LJ Benet got a call from his agent after auditioning for the lead role in Broadway‘s musical adaptation of the 1987 cult film The Lost Boys, he was expecting a gentle letdown. “Honestly, at this point at my career, I had just moved back in with my parents, I’m working as a handyman but also doing regional theater in Los Angeles. I’m thinking, ‘How do I pay my bills?’” he tells Billboard. “In my head, I was walking [into the audition thinking], ‘Dang, Broadway, that’d be sick one day.’” But for Benet, “one day” was that very day. “When they told me I got it, I had a breakdown in my cousin’s studio.”
Like one of the motorcycle-revving, high-flying vampires in The Lost Boys, his career was about to take off. And he had the algorithm gods to thank. “He came up on Instagram,” explains Tony winner Michael Arden, the director and co-lighting designer of Lost Boys, to Billboard. “I don’t know if I got randomly algorithm [connected] to his singing” — he notes they had mutuals from their involvement in an ongoing stage musical series called For the Record — “but I heard his voice and I was like, ‘Holy sh-t, this is a singular voice.’ It was what we were looking for and unable to find.”
Benet, who was working Taskrabbit gigs at the time, knew none of this — nor was he aware that after doing a panto with Lythgoe Productions, producer Becky Lythgoe was simultaneously stumping for him to get a Lost Boys audition behind the scenes. “All of these stars were intertwining,” he marvels, still looking amazed.
