It’s an hour before curtain at “The Lost Boys,” and Ali Louis Bourzgui is rolling out a red yoga mat in his dressing room so he can work his core before the matinee starts. As David, the rock god vampire whose bloodlust drives the Broadway musical’s action, Bourzgui struts across the stage, soars through the air, hangs upside down and, at one point, leaps from a bridge into the orchestra pit.
“You work muscles you didn’t know you had,” Bourzgui says as he bends upward into an inverted pyramid before lunging back toward the ground. “I need this time to just prepare my body for what’s ahead.”
Over the next 30 minutes, Bourzgui will use a resistance band to stretch his arms, perform crunches and lunges and pound an espresso. The exercises come courtesy of a physical therapist that Bourzgui consulted after he got the role, but he’s modified the routine with a few tricks he learned from Billy Mulholland, the production’s aerial trainer. Bourzgui and the other vampires spend a large part of the show suspended by wires as they fly across the Palace Theatre, and that’s put a strain on the actor’s shoulders and back. But it’s also taught him a valuable lesson.
“I used to have a fear of heights, but doing this show proved to me that I can conquer anything,” Bourzgui says. Part of his newfound assuredness he attributes to the character he’s playing. In the show, David calls the shots, running herd on the bloodsucking members of his band by the sheer force of his magnetism.
