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You think you are busy? Try stepping into Lorin Latarro’s shoes for a moment. The acclaimed choreographer has had a busy spring with Chess opening on Broadway, an acclaimed revival of The Producers transferring to the West End, and pre-production of a brand new musical, just to name a few.
I recently caught up with Lotarro to chat about all things Chess, ten years of Waitress, and how she keeps it all together. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
With so many projects, how do you keep them all straight in your brain!
I have the best associates and I stay in close contact with all of my associates. I have one running Mrs. Doubtfire, I have one running Waitress, Tommy is about to kick off in the fall, and we're planning that carefully. I just have a really great team of people and we stay in close communication. Same thing with the directors I work with!
So let’s chat all things Chess. Were you always a fan of this score?
I have always been a fan; always a fan. Tom Hulce and Michael Mayer are really two of the most formative artists in my career. Mayer told me to stop performing and start choreographing full-time because he liked what he saw. He asked me to be the associate on American Idiot, which Hulce was one of the producers on. We, of course, became very, very close on that process and Michael has been a champion and a dear friend ever since. And I feel very lucky to be with both of them on Chess.
I think one of the most exciting moments of the entire season is watching Aaron Tveit get thrown into his pants (IYKYK), talk to me about bringing that moment to life.
Well, I have to give credit where credit is due. Aaron came to me and he was like, hey, I had this crazy idea. What if I start undressed and I get dressed? I immediately loved this. I think the older I get, the more I learn that when you have great artists in the room, you listen closely, they know what's right. You know what I mean? And he knew. So this was him. And then we just started playing around with it all. I got the women in the room and made sure that they felt like they were a big part of how they wanted to dance this on stage in 2026. And they were incredibly game and had lots of input. It was such a beautiful collaboration between all of us. And incredibly fun. I love partnering so we were able to incorporate that. It's a hard to song to choreograph to, it's not fast and it's not slow, you have to find the story inside of it.
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I just caught The Producers over in London.
Oh good, I'm so glad you saw Richard Kind.
It was a performance I will never forget. He is one of a kind. What is it like as an American choreographer going over there and building such an American this show from the ground up in London?
It was really fun. The British actors and actresses are extraordinary. It honestly feels the same as here. It's fun to sort of get to shock them a little bit with my Americanisms. I'm so New York, as it will…and so they had a lot of fun with that. Patrick Marber is deliciously funny so that was a joy. What I'm proud of is that I think we have sort of a British and an American sense of humor in it, and it's been essentialized, but I think the heart is kept whole.
What do you hope folks take away when they go see this production of The Producers that is currently playing?
That there's no such thing as something that is dated if it is good. It defies time if it's good work. And funny is hard. Mel Brooks was a genius. And if you haven't seen his documentary, I think you should see it, it's really wonderful. But funny is as hard, if not harder, than serious.
I can't believe it's been a decade of Waitress. As you reflect back over the last 10 years of this musical—still on its UK tour—what comes to mind?
Again, so deeply grateful. That was a really big opportunity for me. Jesse and Diane and Sarah, we all remain friends. And, you know, we keep working at the show. It's a living, breathing thing. So every time we do it again, we go back at it. I was just on an email chain last week about something, so it's great that we keep tinkering. The show continues to sort of get more and more refined, which is incredible. It's a beautiful show that really holds up.
For me, it's such a landmark time in my life. I had just gotten married, and I was trying to get pregnant, and the whole show is about having a baby, and now I have an eight-year-old. So the show sort of propelled me into motherhood, and now, I mark my daughter's years sort of with how they related to Waitress in a way.
I want to chat about directing. I still have my mop from Joy sitting in my office. Was that always a goal for you?
You know, choreographing is not dissimilar to directing. It's just that you're directing the movement of the piece. And in a way, directing is sort of like shifting your focus to making the whole ship move, not just, you know, parts of it. I have never lived my life as an artist wanting this or that, just sort of listened and seen where it has taken me. When I stopped performing and started choreographing, something inside of me wanted to be there more and do the act of creation. And that happened with directing as well. I am finding that I’m really loving doing this side of it, it all works together.
You are just starting work on Begin Again which will head out to The Old Globe later this fall.
I can't wait. We are in the middle of a four-week workshop, which is thrilling that the producers were generous enough to do this for us. We're going to put a whole show on its feet. We will learn so much. And what I'm really excited about is I'm getting to do this before I'm building the set design. As opposed to having a set design imposed on us, where we have to sort of fit inside of it, we are really collaborating with Derek McLean, who's designing the set, to figure out what we need for the show based on what we think the show is and how it moves. And I actually think it's quite a choreographic way in, isn't it? You know, doing it that way.
To circle back to Chess, I’m curious when you think about where you are now with Waitress, what do you want to remember most about this production in a decade?
Grateful is the word that keeps coming up, but it is really true. We had such an exciting rehearsal process and Lea and Nick and Aaron were such beautiful leaders in the room. The thing that I will personally remember is the ensemble. These artists on that stage doing this eight times a week. Extraordinary ensemblists, and each one of them could be a principle on Broadway. If you look at that cast, the things they're doing both in dance and singing is so exceptional; I will never forget the amount of energy and love they gave us, the creative team in the room, and the amount of pride they take in their jobs. It is truly singular. And the cherry on top of working with Tom and Michael these many years later after American Idiot for me, again,is a very, very special moment.
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The Lost Boys, and by that I mean the musical adaptation which opened tonight on Broadway at the Palace Theatre, starts with a bang. If anything, the show lives up to that adrenaline rush by delivering jaw-dropping sets and special effects, jump scares, and a funhouse of surprises for fans of the movie and newcomers alike. But does it all add up?
Based on Joel Schumacher’s 1987 cult classic of the same name, Michael Arden and team have cleverly massaged the original’s plot to translate it to the stage. The Emerson family are still the center of the story as we find them in transition from Phoenix, AZ to the seedy beach town of Santa Carla in California.
Lucy (Shoshana Bean) has taken her two sons, the brooding Michael (LJ Benet) and Sam (Benjamin Pajak), who has “an eye for footwear” and decor aesthetics, out of an abusive home and back to her hometown and the house her father left her when he died.
With scars both literal and figurative from his past, Michael is disaffected and displaced, with an ache to be a part of a family that’s whole and doesn’t require survival. That’s when he finds David (Ali Louis Bourzgui), his misfit brothers, and more importantly, he finds Star (Maria Wirries), the mysterious girl he’s inexorably drawn to.
On the other side of the boardwalk, Lucy, a former hippie nostalgic for the Summer of Love, finds a job at a video store and a surprising spark with its conservative, Barry Goldwater-admiring owner Max (Paul Alexander Nolan). The comic book-obsessed Sam meets Edgar and Alan Frog (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka, respectively), a bumbling duo of sibling vigilantes who clue Sam in on Santa Carla’s biggest secret: it’s overrun with vampires. Or, so they believe.
Arden and the team’s smartest decision was to turn David and The Lost Boys into a punk rock band. (The book is by David Hornsby & Chris Hoch, music and lyrics by the Los Angeles-based band The Rescues.) The music’s power of seduction perfectly mirrors David’s own powers to sway and coerce. If anything, it provides the perfect excuse to amp up their iconic hardcore, steampunk aesthetic from the movie. (Costume design by Ryan Park; hair & wig design by David Brian Brown.)
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While the book writers have gone at great length to expand the backstory of several characters, including David, the apparent leader of these undead punk rockers, which is particularly effective, the rest of the Lost Boys: Marko (Brian Flores), Dwayne (Sean Grandillo), and Paul (Dean Maupin) are stuck in thinly sketched, sidekick mode. Mercifully, they’ve given Star more to do and say than the movie provides her with and Bean, a Broadway veteran with a formidable presence on stage and a voice that fills the house, takes on the complicated layers of a mother losing her grip on an adolescent son while trying to forge her own life.
The musical channels the 80s maximalism of the movie in Dane Laffrey’s elaborate, towering sets and Jen Schriever’s gorgeous, cinematic lighting design. (Arden also gets credit for lighting.) Just when you think there isn’t room for another location, another one rolls in. This production has to have the record for most motorcycles on stage. Those elements, along with Markus Maurette’s special effects, could be considered worth the price of admission.
Where this grand spectacle starts to unravel is in the music. The Rescues’ cliche-ridden lyrics fail to interestingly explore the emotions of the characters while only intermittently moving the plot along. There are a few standouts among a parade of songs I can’t remember.
Bourzgui is both scary and sexy as David. He amps up the homoerotic undertones of his relationship with Michael. His performance may live in the shadow of Kiefer Sutherland’s from the movie, but Bourzgui makes strides to make it his own nonetheless. Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka fail to totally capture the particular lovable dopiness of the Frog brothers, though they are both game and charming and welcome comic relief.
Vampire stories are about the changing body and the alienation that comes with it. Arden also makes sure we remember we are in the era of Reagan, when the heterosexual, nuclear family was upheld as the paragon of virtue and honor, a bulwark against the degenerate and unseemly. Anything that fell below that standard was vulnerable to attack. Arden’s expert direction signals at these themes, yet the book boils it down to trite messaging.
We’re left reminded that families come in all shapes and sizes. They can be formed around circumstances other than genetics and blood.
Well, in this case, blood might have something to do with it, too.
The Lost Boys is now in performance at the Palace Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
Is August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone a hangout play?
In its conception, perhaps not. Written in 1984 as the second installment in Wilson’s celebrated “Pittsburgh Cycle,” Joe Turner delicately unfolds the backstories of several troubled residents at a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911.
Contemplative in tone, it is certainly one of Wilson’s quieter works. Yet the play probably shouldn’t feel like an extended chill-out session, as it frequently does in Debbie Allen’s new Broadway staging. Softness slides into sleepiness in this unremarkable revival, now at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, which never comes to life despite several intriguing performances.
Under a sharper directorial hand, even Wilson in a softer register can hum with disquieting intensity. Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s superb 2017 revival of Jitney dialed into that frequency expertly and pulsed with energizing life. And while LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s spooky 2022 staging of The Piano Lesson was a tad overwrought, it similarly buzzed with the piquant vigor of Wilson’s evocative dialogue.
Jackson and team also conjured an otherworldly presence in Piano Lesson, that intangible plane of existence just outside of our own. By contrast, Allen’s staging of Joe Turner is earthbound to a fault, floating by with an easy-breezy energy that often baffles.
The issue is most pronounced around our ostensible leads, patriarch Seth Holly (Cedric the Entertainer) and his wife Bertha (Taraji P. Henson), who together manage the boarding house. The Hollys are the most stable and grounded figures in this story, having found mutual comfort and shared purpose. But here, Seth and Bertha too often feel like background players, only vaguely concerned with the various dramas passing through their home. Mr. Entertainer is playing it chillaxed; and while Henson is stronger, her rousing delivery of Bertha’s moving late monologue about life’s purpose (“All you need is to have love in one hand, and laughter in the other”) feels like the first and only time Bertha is allowed to own the space.
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Among the passers-through in the Holly home, a strong array of performers find various degrees of success. It is the grounded, intimate side stories that find a place easier in Allen’s production. So the play’s two young women stand out the most: sweetly Mattie Campbell and self-sufficient Molly Cunningham. A heartbreakingly gentle Nimime Sierra Wureh is excellent as Mattie, while a sharp-edged Maya Boyd steals a few scenes as Molly. Both enjoy a sharp repartee with quick-tongued womanizer Jeremy Furlow, likably portrayed by Tripp Taylor.
The men of this story carry burdens of a more spiritual nature, and these actors have a harder time in a staging that does not look to conjure ghosts. The invaluable Santiago-Hudson, as local hoodoo practitioner Bynum Walker, is a seasoned interpreter of Wilson’s work, and delivers Bynum’s winding monologues with natural ease. Yet excellent as he is, Santiago-Hudson feels like he’s in a different production all of his own.
So too does Joshua Boone as the mysterious and often menacing Harold Loomis, the beating heart of Wilson’s play. Traumatized by seven years of forced labor under the hand of white “mancatcher” Joe Turner, Loomis is seeking absolution and a new place in the world. Boone is terrific in the role, fiery and brutishly intense. His Loomis is a genuinely frightening figure—Boone does not shy away from the character’s instability, even as Loomis’ essential goodness always remains palpable.
But as with Walker, this production lets down the character of Loomis a bit by neglecting the play’s deep connections to that other plane of existence. Both characters look to find “their song,” a path that leads them to shared visions of, “Bones rising up out of the water” and then swept violently to shore.
Allen and her designers only engage visually with these apparitions when the text absolutely forces it. The lighting, by Stacey Derosier, is resolutely naturalistic except at each act’s conclusion, when it goes haywire a bit too abruptly. David Gallo’s set has nothing non-literal to offer, attractive as it is. Allen instead leans heavily on musical underscoring by Steve Bargonetti—but this mostly creeps in to heavy-handily underline or highlight dramatic moments.
For all its issues, this Joe Turner still packs a punch once that final scene arrives. Effective buildup or no, Wilson was a master at a shattering conclusion.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is now in performance at the Barrymore Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.
