Nothing has earned a stake through the heart faster than a Broadway vampire musical. Dance of the Vampires, Lestat, and Dracula all vaporized on sight. And The Lost Boys, with its flying vamps, motorcycle chases, and a climactic scene on a railroad bridge, would seem destined for a similar fate. But despite this genre’s baggage, this adaptation of Joel Schumacher’s comedy horror film about a brood of ferally sensual teen vampires may just buck that trend, as it’s more visually jaw-dropping and effortlessly cool than it has any right to be.
For director Michael Arden’s last hit, Maybe Happy Ending, he had the advantage of building a stunning staging out of a dramatically driven score and pitch-perfect book. The Lost Boys offers neither, though the songs (by the band the Rescues) and the script (by actors Chris Hoch and David Hornsby) are faithful to the film’s spooky-kooky, intensely ’80s vibes.
As he proved in his musically precise staging of Parade, Arden’s greatest gift as a musical theater director is rhythmic. Each vampiric liftoff, fanged nosedive toward an unsuspecting neck, and unearthly lighting effect (by Arden and Jen Schriever) is so pinpointedly timed with the music that the rock anthems seem to spill out of the show’s visuals.
There are also, of course, characters, though they’re sometimes less captivating than the set. Lucy Emerson (Shoshana Bean) is moving her boys Michael (LJ Benet) and Sam (Benjamin Pajak) from Phoenix to Santa Carla to escape her violent ex-husband, and what a move it is: Set designer Dane Laffrey sends the first floor of the house hurtling up from below the stage while the second floor—bedroom and bathroom—descends thrillingly from above.
Not to be outdone by architecture, the vampires arrive swiftly once Michael catches the eye of Star (Maria Wirries, boasting a mightily powerful belt) on the boardwalk. She’s a member of the Lost Boys, a gang reimagined for the musical as a rock band fronted by the leather-clad David (Ali Louis Bourzgui) with a bleached blond mullet. They play for small crowds in the early evening, then feast on the blood of innocent victims in the dead of night. Star’s just a half-vampire, though, since she’s so far refused to make her first kill. Soon enough, Michael succumbs to peer pressure, drinks from a chalice, and becomes a half-vampire himself.
Half or not, he can still fly, and he does for the first time in the show’s most glorious fusion of melody and visual effects. (The aerial design is by Gwyneth Larson and Billy Mulholland.) Leaping off a bridge, in a moment that should have been the film’s least adaptable, Arden conjures up a breathtaking beauty of a tableau, as Michael hangs suspended in mid-air, fog swirling around him, as he sings the Rescues’s prettiest tune, “Belong to Someone.”
The Lost Boys’s chief problems arise in moments of motionlessness. When the tempo slows from electrifying chase sequences or airborne ambushes, the machinery fully comes to a halt. There’s little tension or subtext in the romantic duets for Michael and Star, and Bean’s big ballad “Wild” only takes off once she climbs aboard a playground roundabout, belting exuberantly while spinning around and around. Now that’s musical theater.
Wisely, there’s not much attempt to humanize the baddies, so we can relish their pulverization without guilt. A traumatic family backstory helps raise the stakes (pun intended) within the Emerson family, and Benet and Bean play their tension persuasively: “I stayed when we should have run,” Lucy sings, striving to make up for her role in Michael’s abuse at his father’s hands.
Since Schumacher’s film was already plenty queer-coded with all those angstily homoerotic bloodsuckers, it’s overkill to make 14-year-old Sam put up posters of Rob Lowe, ogle a shirtless saxophonist (an homage to a cameo in the film), and profess that he has an “eye for footwear.” At least Pajak, the best kid on Broadway since the 2022 Music Man, is a delightful scene-stealer even when saddled with singing that maybe he “can make it cool to be queer.” That characterization weirdly feels more dated than anything in the film.
Pajak fortunately also gets to lead the show’s more delightful vampiric coming-out number, “My Brother Is a…,” as he pieces together the clues (sleeping during the day, aversion to light, crashing through the second-story window, and so forth): “Well, this explains a lot/He’s been acting like a freak/It’s worse than I thought/It’s turning out to be a real shit week.” A chorus of cartoonish Draculas pop up around him in the show’s most sensible embrace of its own ridiculousness. Nobody’s flying just then, but The Lost Boys, with its addictive sense of whimsical wonder, is soaring all on its own.
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Great review, Dan! Thanks!