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Michael Arden doesn’t just direct Broadway shows — he builds entire worlds from the ground up. A two-time Tony Award-winning director, Arden won for Best Direction of a Musical for Parade in 2023, and then for Maybe Happy Ending in 2025. His latest show, The Lost Boys, earned 12 Tony nominations, including Best Musical and nods for both his direction and his lighting design — an historic first. Beyond the stage, Arden co-founded At Rise Creative, a producing company that has now won three Tony Awards and is rewriting the rules of how theater gets made.
Speaking with Entrepreneur on the eve of this year’s Tony Awards, Arden shared his journey from a kid watching the Tonys on his grandparents’ living room floor in Midland, Texas to becoming Broadway’s most in-demand multi-hyphenate.
What is the process of turning a movie into a musical? Who decides that?
Every show is different. But the story of The Lost Boys is that our producers, Patrick Wilson, James Carpinello, and Marcus Chait, all went to college together, and were huge fans of this movie. They had tried to get the rights for a long time to do it as a musical, and finally I think Patrick Wilson probably made Warner Bros. enough money in his Conjuring franchise that they had to take the meeting in earnest. They managed to get the rights, and then they came to me and said, “Would you be interested?” And I said, “Hold on, I better watch the movie.”
Wait, you never saw the movie?
Not until then. And this was in 2021! When I saw it, I was just taken by this idea that it was so many things in one — an adventure movie, a comedy, a horror movie, a coming-of-age story. But ultimately I thought the kernel of it was a story about a family trying to find their way back to each other. And so it seemed like these themes were really exciting to explore in a musical. And then five years later, here we are on Broadway.
And did you watch it a million times since?
No. I only watched it twice in my life. I didn’t want to be trying to do the movie on stage. I wanted to say, “Okay, what are the things that really stuck with me?” There are certain things that bubble to the top when you only get to see something once — things that feel like the important tent pole moments or set pieces or themes. Because we can’t do a movie on stage. It has to be its own thing, and you have to think about the audience’s needs when walking into a theater to sit there for two and a half hours. You can’t have those close-ups you’d see on screen. You sort of need to mine a little bit deeper.
You made one very big change in the vampires. Can you explain that decision?
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