Broadway review: The Lost Boys, a musical that goes for blood
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★ (four stars)
Ticketing: Buy tickets to The Lost Boys
Swooping in, teeth bared, at the close of an anemic season for Broadway musicals, The Lost Boys is out for blood. Adapted from the 1987 coming-of-fangs film about teenagers fighting a vampire infestation in southern California, this show aims to set your pulse bounding; no other new tuner this season has been so ambitious in scope or anywhere near so spectacular in stagecraft. Director Michael Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffrey, whose past collaborations include Maybe Happy Ending and A Christmas Carol, have again created a world we’ve never seen onstage before: surprising, thrilling, sometimes genuinely unsettling. The good things about The Lost Boys are so good, in fact, that they make its fumbles especially frustrating; there’s a sense of lost opportunity. But to an impressive extent, the show succeeds where earlier vampire-themed musicals—the ironically short-lived Dance of the Vampires, Dracula and Lestat—have merely sucked.
The title refers, in part, to a pair of teenage brothers in immortal peril: the rebellious Michael (LJ Benet), who rides a motorcycle and wears a leather jacket, and the younger and dorkier Sam (Benjamin Pajak), who likes comic books and has a thing for Rob Lowe. With their newly single mother, Lucy (Shoshanna Bean), they have just moved into a weird old house in Santa Carla. What they don’t know is that this sunny fictional beach town is “the murder capital of the world,” thanks to another group of lost boys: a quartet of undead bloodsuckers led by the platinum-blond David (Ali Louis Bourzgui). The latter are a very dark riff on the Lost Boys from Peter Pan—they never get old, they can fly, they reject adult authority—and Michael, like his Darling namesake in J.M. Barrie’s story, is drawn into their ranks.
In the movie, Michael is tricked into becoming a vampire; in the musical he joins them by choice. “I’m tried of wand’rin around,” he sings in what may be the most memorable song in the score by the indie-rock band the Rescues. “Been searching for something more / Something worth living for / I wanna belong to someone.” Michael is not seeking power; what he really wants is to “surrender control,” because he’s on the run from something monstrous inside himself—an aftershock of the abuse he suffered from his father. Benet’s passionate, full-throated delivery of the song is a cry of wounded masculinity, rendered in musical terms as a mix of 1980s epic rock and the more modern emotional balladry of, say, Lewis Capaldi (plus a sample of the film's takeaway song, "Cry Sister"). And David is drawn to him, in part, because he has his own bad history with a father; there is new depth to the quasi-homoerotic relationship between the two men, as triangulated via Star (Maria Wirries), a young singer torn between them.
These are just a few of the many improvements that book writers David Hornsby and Chris Hoch make to the film. Lame characters have been cut: the batty grandfather, the Artful Dodger–style waif, Sam’s loyal dog. Star, sorely underwritten in the original, now has a deeper connection to Michael and an affecting solo in which she laments being continually caught in 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 become a rock band, which works perfectly—don’t worry, movie fans, there is still a cameo by the oiled-up sax player of the movie—and David is a fuller character, incarnated with tremendous vocal prowess and charismatic menace by Ali. (Watch for the flash of ecstatic ferocity that whips across his face when he makes his first onstage kill.) The mother of this Lost Boys is a force to be reckoned with, too; Lucy is given several songs, impeccably delivered by Bean, that establish her as an oasis of humanity—especially in another of the score’s highlights, “Wild,” in which she reflects on her lack of eternal youth while rotating on a merry-go-round on a date with the stuffy but affable Max (Paul Alexander Nolan), her employer at the local video store.
The increased seriousness of the storytelling is matched by exceptional visuals. Laffrey’s set is a wonder of shifting vertical levels: a three-tiered framework in the back, a two-floor house whose top story descends from the ceiling, a billboard landing, a main floor space that can be a boardwalk or a playground or an ironworks lair, and even a lower level in the orchestra pit. And that’s just what happened on the ground: There are also many sequences of breathtaking flying effects, in which performers flip, float and fly through 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 plays a key role in these and other effects throughout. I found Adam Fisher’s sound design deafening—is it intended to add to the sensory overwhelm, or maybe necessary to mask set changes?—but Ryan Parks’s costumes and David Brian Brown’s hair and wig design help create a colorful and sometimes humorous 1980s atmosphere.
But here’s the catch: By elevating its material so consistently in the first act, The Lost Boys makes its subsequent change of tone all the more jarring. To some extent, this could be expected: A similar thing happens in the film, which was conceived as a Goonies-style tween-adventure comedy and reverted to that style more and more as it went along (before ending in geysers of gore). In Act Two, the musical moves its focus to its younger characters: Sam and his fellow comic-book nerds, the Frog Brothers (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka), who have previously served as comic relief. In the film, Sam is gay-coded; the musical pulls an Alan Turing on that code, turning him overtly gay. That’s fine, except it triggers a regrettable shift into the kind of camp that The Lost Boys has otherwise smartly avoided. In a nod to his interest in comics, the show gives Sam two numbers that are deliberately cartoonish: one featuring corny old vampire stereotypes in capes and slicked-back hair, the other with corny old superheroes and, I’m afraid, an even 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 seemed like a home run to me: a big swing that connected. But the show’s intensity, rooted in daring sincerity, is compromised by the abject silliness of the Sam numbers and the plague of Frogs that elsewhere overruns the second act. This may be a function of the fact that the musical is premiering directly on Broadway, without prior out-of-town runs; with more development time, the creators might have devised a second half equal to the first. Instead, just when they seem poised to tap into the heart of the vampire musical, they back off and lower the stakes.
The Lost Boys. Palace Theatre (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.
Buy tickets to The Lost Boys: Broadway.com
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