NEW YORK — The flow of boffo new Broadway musicals has been so anemic this season that there is something apropos about the 2025-26 slate concluding with “The Lost Boys,” a musical about vampires.
A very stylish and expansive musical, let me make clear from the start, replete with said undead gents flying in myriad directions all over the Palace Theatre in what feels like many different shades of grey, replete with a slate of brooding male performances and a pounding original rock score that certainly cannot be accused of timidity.
It’s certainly an eye-popping tour de force from the designer Dane Laffrey, and some of the staging from Michael Arden will blow many theatergoers away with its sheer ingenuity, especially when it comes to how this gifted director uses the soaring vertical space. That’s pretty phenomenal; Arden even shares credit with the lighting designer, Jen Schriever. Too much for one person to do, perhaps.
Few moviegoers thought “The Lost Boys” a masterpiece when Joel Schumacher’s movie, the story of the vampire-freckled fictional beach town of Santa Carla, came out in the summer of 1987. But it had a clever plot in how it exploited the halfway house of vampire-dom — the hero Michael (played here by LJ Benet), a newcomer to this Santa Cruz lookalike with his troubled family, becomes afflicted with vampire juice but can still be saved because he has not yet drunk the blood of another human. That allows his loving single mom, Lucy (Shoshana Bean), and a crew of “Frogs,” aka nerds, headed up by little brother Sam (Benjamin Pajak), to try and save him and, by extension, do what musicals always like to do, which is to save and restore a broken family unit.
Add in Michael’s goth love interest Star (Maria Wirries) and the musical strives to capture some of the cult appeal of the source movie, the plot of which David Hornsby and Chris Hoch’s book follows closely with one notable change: the vampires of the California beach town are no longer a gang of motorcycle riders but a rock band favoring 1980s-style tunes, a match for the original score created by the Los Angeles indie crew known as The Rescues.
The target demographic here — young women — will be very interested in the hot band of blood-sucking vampires, here imagined as a sexy, over-amplified crew headed up (and upside down) by the talented “Tommy” star Ali Louis Bourzgui and also featuring Brian Flores, Sean Grandillo and Dean Maupin. They’re all all in, all the time. At one point you worry about blood rushing to their heads but, well, these athletic artists appear up for most anything. They win you over in the end.
This whole affair, which comes replete with a level of special effects comparable only to “Stranger Things” on Broadway, is such a sensory experience overall that it (mostly) covers up the lack of subtlety in the melodramatic book and the lack of formative variety in the score, especially in Act 1.
Only two songs, “Wild” and “Belong to Someone” really stood out to me and, while Act 2 introduces a couple of necessary ballads, the sound effects for the show have a way of melding into the music so the it all starts to sound like too much of a wash.
Benet, who is very appealing, really deserved much more to do vocally. Only the likable Bean really gets to break through with a solo human voice, on the sweet mom song, “Michael.”
The Palace is a big venue of course and, for many hinterland punters, “The Lost Boys” will deliver an epic Broadway blast, an amped-up escape from their prosaic realities and that will do it for a vampire musical. Purists of the form and lovers of subtlety, quietude and nuance will need to clamp down hard on their necks as they walk on by.
“The Lost Boys” certainly is superior to the notorious “Dance of the Vampires,” which I remember seeing at the Minskoff Theatre in 2002, not to mention Elton John’s “Lestat,” in this very theater. Beyond that, non-phantom, non-Dracula vampires aren’t terribly over-exposed in the Broadway genre.
No “Buffy.” Yet.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
At the Palace Theatre, 160 W. 47th St., New York; www.lostboysmusical.com
