The creators of The Lost Boys, the new stage musical based on the cheesy 1987 teenage-vampire flick of the same name, know what you’re thinking. Early on, the owner of the local video store, Max (Paul Alexander Nolan) responds to an employee referencing Little Shop of Horrors with a telling meta joke: “I do hope you’re referring to the black and white classic. Turning a movie into a musical reeks of desperation.”
Recent Broadway seasons have been littered with cinema-inspired misfires like Back to the Future, Rocky, Water for Elephants, and this season’s Beaches whose primary hook has been a title familiar to ticket buyers. So there’s reason to think that this lavish production — which cost cost a reported $25 million to mount, more than three times the original film’s budget — will suffer a similar fate. In addition to Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures (which is also behind this season’s nonmusical behemoth Dog Day Afternoon), the Playbill lists more than 50 producers and co-producing entities, including stars like Slash, Neil Patrick Harris, and original Lost Boys star Kiefer Sutherland.
Despite the long odds, The Lost Boys may be the most spectacular surprise of the Broadway season — a visually captivating show that actually improves on its source material with more fleshed-out characters, a more coherent plot, and a hook-filled rock score that deepens our connection to both the players and their plight. Who knew that a glorified B movie best remembered as a breakout for Gen X stars like Sutherland and Jason Patric could inspire a stage musical with this much energy and heart? It’s enough to drive a stake into cynical naysayers everywhere.
Newbie book writers David Hornsby and Chris Hoch smartly have taken liberties with the original screenplay, a slice of teen-rebellion piffle that never entirely tracked. We still have newly divorced Lucy Emerson (Shoshana Bean) moving out of her Phoenix home with her teenage sons, brooding hottie Michael (LJ Benet) and the queer-coded comic-book dweeb Sam (Benjamin Pajak), and into her old house in coastal Santa Carla, California. But granddad is not around (nor is the family dog) — and his fan-favorite final line is handed to another character in a misguided bit of fan service. Other updates work better. When Michael meets the fetching femme Star (Maria Wirries) on the local boardwalk, she introduces him to a gang of nightcrawling rebels who also happen to be a proto-punk rock band led by the peroxide blond David (Ali Louis Bourzgui, snakishly charming in the Sutherland role). Michael also gets a backstory: an abusive dad, left behind in Arizona, who left bruises that are still visible on his torso and whose violent streak he fears he’s destined to repeat himself.
Benet, in his Broadway debut, has a soulful voice with a rockish lilt to it, and he conveys Michael’s adolescent confusion with open-faced honesty. You inuit his sense of responsibility to his family, his desire to escape the “man of the house” mantle and establish some independence, his romantic yearning for a young woman who might smooth his transition to a new place, and his longing to be part of a group of guys whose freedom and recklessness seem almost irresistible. The downside: they also happen to be vampires responsible for the town’s scores of missing persons cases. This is one frat with a seriously steep initiation ritual.
The score, by the California-based trio The Rescues, is an accomplished blend of ’80s rock pastiche, power ballads, and show tunes that frequently operate on multiple levels at once. The tunes, which often contain sophisticated three- and four-part harmonies, include some absolute bangers, like the rockin’ “Have to Have You” that David and Star croon to Michael and a mosh pit of local youth. There are also well-crafted power ballads, like Bean’s paean to her hippie-ish youth, “Wild,” which the actress delivers with the full-throated gusto and the impressive vocal runs of a woman who really does hope to reclaim her past fearlessness.
The score leans into show-tune bounciness for Pajak’s younger brother Sam, whose proto-queer status from the film (signaled by actor Corey Haim’s flamboyant fashion sense and telltale Rob Lowe poster) is elevated from subtext to text. Sam’s scenes, often played for comedy with sidekicks Edgar and Alan Frog (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka), can be jarring given the heavier, darker tone of the musical overall. But there’s a plainspoken poetry to the lyrics, which remain rooted in the story’s ’80s timeframe. “Why can’t we just be happy at last?” Lucy sings from behind the counter of her job at Max’s indie version of Blockbuster. “What’s so kind about rewinding?”
The Lost Boys has spent its sizable budget wisely. Michael Arden, a two-time Tony winner, pulls off another technical masterpiece with high-tech production design that uses the entirety of the Palace Theatre stage area as a three-dimensional playground (much as he did in last year’s equally impressive but more intimate Maybe Happy Ending). Dane Lafrey’s set pieces appear from the stage floor or the overhead space or the wings with smooth precision, while Arden and co-lighting designer Jen Schriever carve sharp blades of light and shadowy spaces for night dwellers to suddenly emerge. The vampire attack sequences have a cinematic precision, thanks to effects designer Markus Maurette, fight coordinator Sorselet, sound designer Adam Fisher, and aerial designers Gwyneth Holland and Billy Mulholland.
The show looks spectacular — though it’s far less graphic in both its gore and sexiness than Joel Schumacher’s R-rated movie, which generated many of its cheap thrills from closeups of its dewy young stars. In another nod to the material’s multiplex origins, Arden has devised a Broadway first: a post-credit scene that begins after the final curtain call, a sequence involving a minor character that serves as both a callback and teaser for a possible sequel. It’s one of many final gambits that elevate The Lost Boys into something special. ★★★★☆
THE LOST BOYS
Palace Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes (with one intermission)
Tickets on sale through November 21 for $55 to $270