Michael Arden has turned The Lost Boys into a Broadway musical, and Adam Feldman says it arrives with teeth. Time Out Worldwide published Feldman’s Lost Boys Broadway Review and gave the show four stars, calling it a spectacular adaptation of the 1987 vampire flick about teenagers fighting a vampire infestation in southern California.
The production, directed by Arden and created with scenic designer Dane Laffrey, is one of the most ambitious new Broadway musicals of the season and one of the most spectacular in stagecraft. It follows teenage brothers Michael and Sam after they move with their newly single mother, Lucy, into a weird old house in Santa Carla, with Shoshanna Bean as Lucy, LJ Benet as Michael, Benjamin Pajak as Sam and Ali Louis Bourzgui as vampire leader David. Feldman writes that the show is out for blood at the close of an anemic Broadway season.
Arden and Laffrey have already built a reputation for visually striking work together, after collaborating on Maybe Happy Ending and A Christmas Carol. That partnership matters here because The Lost Boys depends on atmosphere as much as story, and the review says the design achieves a scale that few new musicals can match. Santa Carla, in the show, is described as the murder capital of the world, which sets the tone for a production that leans hard into menace and spectacle.
The musical also makes one key change from the film: Michael joins the vampires by choice rather than being tricked into becoming one. Feldman points to one of the score’s most memorable songs, in which Michael sings, “I’m tried of wand’rin around,” and later, “Been searching for something more / Something worth living for / I wanna belong to someone.” That choice gives the adaptation a more overt emotional pull than the original movie’s setup, and it is the part that most clearly separates the show from earlier vampire musicals such as Dance of the Vampires, Dracula and Lestat.
Those earlier shows, Feldman writes, merely sucked. This one, he says, succeeds to an impressive extent. That is the real verdict of the review: after years of failed or forgettable stage vampires, The Lost Boys looks like the rare Broadway monster musical that has found a way to make the genre work.