THE LOST BOYS Is One Bloody Good Time — Review

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.) 

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.