The Lost Boys, a musical that goes for blood
Broadway evaluate by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★ (4 stars)
Ticketing: Buy tickets to The Lost Boys
Swooping in, enamel bared, on the shut of an anemic season for Broadway musicals, The Lost Boys it is out for blood. Adapted from the 1987 coming-of-fangs movie about youngsters preventing a vampire infestation in southern California, this present goals to set your pulse bounding; no different new tuner this season has been so bold in scope or anyplace close to so spectacular in stagecraft. Director Michael Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffreywhose previous collaborations embody Maybe Happy Ending and A Christmas Carolhave once more created a world we have by no means seen onstage earlier than: stunning, thrilling, generally genuinely unsettling. The good issues about The Lost Boys are so good, in reality, that they make their fumbles particularly irritating; there’s a sense of misplaced alternative. But to a formidable extent, the present succeeds the place earlier vampire-themed musicals—the satirically short-lived Dance of the Vampires, Dracula and Lestat—have merely sucked.
The title refers, partially, to a pair of teenage brothers in immortal peril: the rebellious Michael (LJ Benet), who rides a bike and wears a leather-based jacket, and the youthful and dorkier Sam (Benjamin Pajak), who likes comedian books and does a factor for Rob Lowe. With their newly single mom, Lucy (Shoshanna Bean), they’ve simply moved into a bizarre outdated home in Santa Carla. What they do not know is that this sunny fictional seaside city is “the murder capital of the world,” thanks to a different group of misplaced boys: a quartet of undead bloodsuckers led by the platinum-blond David (Ali Louis Bourzgui). The latter are a very darkish riff on the Lost Boys from Peter Pan—they by no means get outdated, they’ll fly, they reject grownup authority—and Michael, like his Darling namesake in JM Barrie’s story, is drawn into their ranks.
In the film, Michael is tricked into changing into a vampire; within the musical he joins them by selection. “I’m tried to wand’rin around,” he sings in what would be the most memorable tune within the rating by the indie-rock band the Rescues. “Been searching for something more / Something worth living for / I wanna belong to someone.” Michael will not be looking for energy; what he actually needs is to “surrender control,” as a result of he is on the run from one thing monstrous inside himself—an aftershock of the abuse he suffered from his father. Benet’s passionate, full-throated supply of the tune is a cry of wounded masculinity, rendered in musical phrases as a mixture of Nineteen Eighties epic rock and the extra trendy emotional balladry of, say, Lewis Capaldi (plus a pattern of the movie’s takeaway tune, “Cry Sister”). And David is drawn to him, partially, as a result of he has his personal unhealthy historical past with a father; there’s new depth to the quasi-homoerotic relationship between the 2 males, as triangulated by way of Star (Maria Wirries), a younger singer turned between them.
These are simply a few of the various enhancements that e book writers David Hornsby and Chris Hoch make to the movie. Lame characters have been minimize: the batty grandfather, the Artful Dodger–fashion waif, Sam’s loyal canine. Star, sorely underwritten within the unique, now has a deeper connection to Michael and an affecting solo through which she laments being regularly caught within the crossfire of male violence: “I’m always in between / A match and gasoline / No matter what I choose / Everything will burn.” The vampires have turn out to be a rock band, which works completely—don’t fret, film followers, there’s nonetheless a cameo by the oiled-up sax player of the film—and David is a fuller character, incarnated with great vocal prowess and charismatic menace by Ali. (Watch for the flash of ecstatic ferocity that whips throughout his face when he makes his first onstage kill.) The mom of this Lost Boys is a pressure to be reckoned with, too; Lucy is given a number of songs, impeccably delivered by Bean, that set up her as an oasis of humanity—particularly in one other of the rating’s highlights, “Wild,” through which she displays on her lack of everlasting youth whereas rotating on a merry-go-round on a date with the stuffy however affable Max (Paul Alexander Nolan), her employer on the native video retailer.
The elevated seriousness of the storytelling is matched by distinctive visuals. Laffrey’s set is a marvel of shifting vertical ranges: a three-tiered framework within the again, a two-floor home whose high story descends from the ceiling, a billboard touchdown, a predominant flooring house that could be a boardwalk or a playground or an ironworks lair, and even a decrease stage within the orchestra pit. And that’s simply what occurred on the bottom: There are additionally many sequences of breathtaking flying results, through which performers flip, float and fly by means of the air. (The aerial design is by Gwyneth Larsen and Billy Mulholland; the choreography is by Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant.) The arresting lighting design by Jen Schriever and Arden performs a key position in these and different results all through. I discovered Adam Fisher’s sound design deafening—is it supposed so as to add to the sensory overwhelm, or perhaps essential to masks set adjustments?—however Ryan Parks’s costumes and David Brian Brown’s hair and wig design assist create a colourful and generally humorous Nineteen Eighties ambiance.
But this is the catch: By elevating its materials so persistently within the first act, The Lost Boys makes its subsequent change of tone all of the extra jarring. To some extent, this could possibly be anticipated: The same factor occurs within the movie, which was conceived as a Goonies-style tween-adventure comedy and reverted to that fashion increasingly more because it went alongside (earlier than ending in geysers of gore). In Act Two, the musical strikes its focus to its youthful characters: Sam and his fellow comic-book nerds, the Frog Brothers (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka), who’ve beforehand served as comedian aid. In the movie, Sam is gay-coded; the musical pulls an Alan Turing on that code, turning him overtly homosexual. That’s superb, besides it triggers a regrettable shift into the type of camp that The Lost Boys you could have in any other case neatly prevented. In a nod to his curiosity in comics, the present offers Sam two numbers that are intentionally cartoonish: one that includes corny outdated vampire stereotypes in capes and slicked-back hair, the opposite with corny outdated superheroes and, I’m afraid, an excellent cornier new message: “Maybe I can be a hero here / And make it cool to be queer / Maybe that’s my superpower.”
At intermission, The Lost Boys It appeared like a house run to me: a large swing that linked. But the present’s depth, rooted in daring sincerity, is compromised by absolutely the silliness of the Sam numbers and the plague of Frogs that elsewhere overruns the second act. This could also be a operate of the very fact that the musical is premiering immediately on Broadway, with out prior out-of-town runs; With extra improvement time, the creators might need devised a second half equal to the primary. Instead, simply once they appear poised to faucet into the guts of the vampire musical, they again off and decrease the stakes.
The Lost Boys. Palace Theater (broadway). Book by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch. Music and lyrics by the Rescues. Directed by Michael Arden. With LJ Benet, Shoshana Bean, Ali Louis Bourzgui, Benjamin Pajak, Maria Wirries, Paul Alexander Nolan. Running time: 2hrs 35mins. One intermission.
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