'The Lost Boys' Broadway review — cult-classic teen movie gets a musical re-vamp

Read our review of The Lost Boys on Broadway, a new musical adaptation of the 1987 vampire film at the Palace Theatre, directed by Tony Award winner Michael Arden.

Summary

• The Lost Boys is based on the same-named 1987 film about a family who moves to a vampire-filled California town
• Ali Louis Bourzgui delivers a standout performance in an uneven musical as head vampire David
• The show is recommended for fans of the movie and other vampire media like Lestat; Buffy the Vampire Slayer; and the current Off-Broadway musical Blood/Love

A platinum-mulleted and leathered Ali Louis Bourzgui rises within the titanic Palace Theatre as David, the magnetic villain of the film-to-musical adaptation The Lost Boys. Tony Award-winning director Michael Arden's latest project may be tonally messy, but Bourzgui could hypnotize you into baring your neck for his fangs.

His character has a similar hypnotic effect on Michael Emerson (LJ Benet), an angsty teen who moves to Santa Carla, California in 1987 with his single mom, Lucy (Shoshana Bean), and younger brother, Sam (Benjamin Pajak). Michael has no idea this beach town has a vampire coven masquerading as a rock band: the titular Lost Boys, frozen in delinquent youth and mysterious lore. The original Joel Schumacher-directed movie is no exception to vampire media as a magnetic — and sexual — repository for coming-of-age narratives, body horror, drug addiction metaphors, and sexual otherness, even as part of ostensibly heteronormative narratives. When Michael first meanders the neon-lit boardwalk where he encounters David and the band, Jen Schriever and Arden’s lighting design floods Dane Laffrey's dark, multi-leveled set in purple-blue bisexual lighting. It resurfaces when Michael hallucinates his father (a ruthless Ben Crawford), the abusive monster the Emersons escaped, berating him for crying.

Although Michael is courting David’s co-lead singer, the vivacious Star (Maria Wirries), his corrosive bond with the predatory David renders the rest of the musical’s relationships forgettable. “We both have fathers who don’t deserve us,” David commiserates as he inserts himself as a toxic kind-of replacement.

In a show of intrigue and masculine hubris, Michael takes the vamps' adrenaline-fueled dares: playing guitar, racing motorcycles, and dangling from a bridge over trains. The temptations culminate in the luscious a cappella siren song “My Heart With You” as the brethren pressure Michael to drink blood, with transformative properties, from a chalice. The final half of Act 1 marathons into a maximalist opera of catharsis (with Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant's silky aerial choreography and Gwyneth Larsen and Billy Mulholland's aerial design) as Michael awakens into a dreamlike vampiric rebirth. But following the effusive chorale of “Secret Comes Out” before intermission, the rest of The Lost Boys struggles to achieve this thrall.

To its credit, the adaptation pumps lifeblood into the theme of cyclical patriarchal violence. The opening sneaks in the political context that enveloped the movie’s release by showing Ronald Reagan's televised “family values” speech, which contrasts the Emersons’ aim to cleanse themselves of a father figure. Reaganites would also bristle at the book’s welcome update: Sam's budding queer consciousness, starting with the sight of a shirtless, oil-slicked saxophone player (Cameron Loyal).

However, David Hornsby and Chris Hoch's script is unable to flesh out the characters beyond archetypical shells. Wirries makes the best out of Star's underbaked backstory of parental abandonment, though her onstage characterization is at least a step up from her blank-slate film counterpart. Pajak’s Sam and the vampire-hunting Frog brothers (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka, the latter adding a layer of gender nonconformity to the material) are reduced to parodic precociousness, and not the charming kind. Sam’s imaginings of cartoon vampires and colorful superheroes, perhaps well-intentioned Schumachian camp, end up being mood killers.

There's also the sense that the hit-or-miss songwriters, the indie pop band The Rescues, luxuriate in scoring for their rock-star bloodsuckers but not so much the mortals, who get merely serviceable harmonies. A melodic Bean over-relies on her stratospheric belt to smooth over The Rescues’ lyrical wrinkles. Lucy’s expanded backstory as a struggling single mom whose flower-child past has wilted away into domesticity doesn’t liberate her from being one-note. At least Lucy’s love interest, the video store owner Max (Paul Alexander Nolan), offers a compelling counterpoint. With a congenial demeanor, he tempts Lucy with traditional paternal stability.

The Lost Boys’s rushed final battle traces back to the source material’s spectacle-driven climax. A post-curtain call epilogue, theatrically fun but thematically sloppy, suggests vampires will always rise elsewhere beyond Hollywood endings. It’s a testament to Bourzgui’s magnetism that he still eclipses everything that came before.

The Lost Boys summary

The Lost Boys musical takes its plot from the cult classic 1987 horror-comedy film directed by Joel Schumacher and written by Janice Fischer, James Jeremias, and Jeffrey Boam. In 1987, hoping to heal from old wounds, the Emersons are thirsting for change when they move from Phoenix, Arizona to Santa Carla, California — which is unfortunately the Murder Capital of the World, stocked with missing-person signs.

Her two sons encounter the potential for belonging in two different places. For the teenage Michael, it's a found family of vampires led by the predatory David, and for the younger Sam, a pair of Rambo-loving, comic-obsessed vampire hunters, the Frog brothers. As Michael finds himself drawn to David’s brethren and Star, the half-vampire tasked with luring him in, they tempt him into a metamorphosis beyond his understanding.

The story is not associated with Peter Pan, though the Lost Boys title is inspired by the fact that vampires never grow up.

What to expect at The Lost Boys

Michael Arden uses below-stage pits inventively but with a price: The higher and further to the side your seat, the more likely it will have an obstructed view. When I sat in the highest balcony at a previous performance, I could not see the ensemble at the lip of the stage to perform the bulk of Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant’s wild concert choreography in a tight pit. Balcony audiences rose and craned their necks to catch the jaw-dropping stagecraft and flying bodies.

Laffrey's moneyed production design includes the brothers’ shared bedroom, a massive Santa Carla billboard, floating platforms, a lair elevator, and a spectacular bridge.

For die-hard film fans, expect the omission of the grandpa (Barnard Hughes in the film), now ashes in an urn. Don’t sweat it. It’s a wise choice so the Emersons can triumph alone.

What audiences are saying about The Lost Boys

Averaged from 383 ratings on Show-Score, The Lost Boys has an 88% audience approval score, with theatregoers praising the performances and high-energy entertainment value. Early performances have generated considerable buzz across social media, with numerous TikTok users having already attended multiple shows.

• “This show's definitely going to land, especially with younger audiences. It's high-energy, loud, and packed with hot, sexy, flying vampires belting rock ballads all over the stage [...] Some of the musical themes do get a bit redundant at times, and it felt a little longer than it needed to be-but still a fun night at the theatre.” - Show-Score user Phantom of Broadway
• In contrast, Mezzanine app user Dave G found the music “unmelodic” and lacking momentum.
• TikTok user Tyler Nabinger said, on his experience from an obstructed-view seat, “From the jump you know you’re getting into an experience [...] The multi-tiered set design and the crisp lighting and sound are practically immaculate [...] The second act feels a little musically bombastic in that almost every song has the heft of a showstopper [...] I thought that the book was thin or unmemorable [...] Still, I felt the experience was cinematic.”
• “Whether you’re new to the material or a fan of the movie, the Lost Boys is an entertaining joyride. Weak lyrics may be excused for the sheer magnitude of it, and who cares if there’s an occasional wire when the flying vampires feel plucked out of a movie?” - My +1 at the show

Read more audience reviews of The Lost Boys on Show-Score.

Who should see The Lost Boys

• Fans of the cult-classic film will have more meat to chew on from the musical, which foregrounds queer themes from the subtext of Joel Schumacher’s work.
• Likewise, die-hard fans of vampire media, like Anne Rice’s literature (Lestat being another Broadway musical adaptation) or Dance of the Vampires, should also check out The Lost Boys and Blood/Love, a fun vampire pop opera playing blocks away at Theater 555.
• Fans of director Michael Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffrey’s collaborations on Once On This Island, Parade, and Maybe Happy Ending would be game to see what the Tony-winning creative duo does with flying teen vampires.
• Theatre fans thirsting for more of Ali Louis Bourzgui’s magnetism, previously on display in The Who’s Tommy and We Live in Cairo, will be entranced by his alluring performance. After all, he plays a character long considered a predecessor to other influential vampires like Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
• Broadway stalwarts like Shoshana Bean and Paul Alexander Nolan will also attract theatre fans.

Learn more about The Lost Boys on Broadway

Ali Louis Bourzgui soars as the lifeblood of The Lost Boys on Broadway. The new book adds a consciousness of queerness and patriarchal violence, but like its conflicted half-vampires, The Lost Boys loiters in limbo between and '80s nostalgia and uneven novelty.

Learn more and get The Lost Boys tickets on New York Theatre Guide. The Lost Boys is at the Palace Theatre.

Photo credit: The Lost Boys on Broadway. (Photos by Matthew Murphy)