The Lost Boys review – 80s vampire musical lacks Broadway bite

View image in fullscreen

Palace theatre, New York

Joel Schumacher’s much-loved movie gets a splashy stage transfer which might be technically impressive but the songs never come to life

Brand-dependent mega-musicals aren’t hitting Broadway any less often. But they might be getting a little more respectable. Maybe it helps that some recent adaptations haven’t focused so heavily on stone cold classics. It might be a stretch to call Joel Schumacher’s 1987 teen-vampire movie The Lost Boys a cult attraction, and it’s certainly a fun film, but it isn’t exactly at the rareified level of Back to the Future or Rocky. On a purely technical level, it’s easy to enjoy the well-crafted spectacle of the stage version without it feeling like a theme-park attraction designed to wow tourists six times a day at Universal Studios. (The Back to the Future musical, on the other hand, very much felt like that.)

So if nothing else, The Lost Boys is allowed to stumble on its own terms on stage. The story still follows the Emerson family – older brother Michael (LJ Benet), younger Sam (Benjamin Pajak), and guilt-ridden mom Lucy (Shoshana Bean) – fleeing domestic strife in Arizona, hoping to start over in Lucy’s old home town of Santa Carla, California. The kids quickly discover that the 80s-punk facade of the Santa Clara boardwalk (barely) conceals a hotbed of vampire activity. The vamps’ seemingly youthful rebellion lures in Michael, who is instantly attracted to Star (Maria Wirries), not realizing that bloodsucking ringleader David (Ali Louis Bourzgui) has charged her with turning him. Sam, on the other hand, falls in with a pair of would-be vampire hunters closer to his age, the enthusiastic Frog brothers (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka). Hardcore fans of the film needn’t worry: the stage show also trots out a saxophone player whose extreme shininess (sweat or oil?) is a subject of unanswered inquiry. (Here he’s a boardwalk eccentric rather than an inexplicable punk-culture side man.)

The Lost Boys film is best-known and most heartily recommended for its SoCal gothic vibes. Visually speaking, director Michael Arden recaptures that element with gusto, using ever-shifting neon-sign lighting, occasional pyro, and some spectacular mid-air stunts to create an immersive experience within his towering multi-set proscenium. At times, this gives the production a welcome physicality that carries over to the actual people on stage. The famous scene where Michael joins a vampire initiation ritual and lets himself fall from a railway bridge, for example, may play even better watching real bodies take the plunge. Sometimes the production goes overboard with its elaborate spare-no-expense sensibility; is it really necessary to lower in a gigantic Arizona postcard to serve as a backdrop for a driving scene that lasts a few minutes? Much of the time, though, it resembles a terrific venue hosting a so-so rock band.

That latter distinction isn’t the actors’ fault; everyone is playing their part sincerely, even when it might be tempting to put the “amp” in “camp” for what is now a conscious period piece rather than an attempt at contemporary cool. The attempts to modernize the text while keeping it in ‘87 mostly involve expressions of gender and sexuality: Sam is strongly implied to be gay, and one of the Frog brothers is played, with a great deal of charm, by Duka – a young woman, though her character insists on being referred to as male. The performances that more directly recall the original film work, too: Bourzgui may be doing something of a Kiefer Sutherland impression as the charismatic baddie, but he never quite sounds like he’s fronting a tribute band.

Sonically, though, maybe the show could have used a little more tribute-band energy. The songs, by rock act The Rescues, don’t really match the vampires’ west-coast punk aesthetics, or even any particularly notable musical performers from 1987. A few numbers have a little edge, but not much bite overall, further softened by some terribly hoary rhymes. The Rescues seem to aim closer to emo power ballad than goth-rock grandeur, with generic modern-Broadway yearning in place of wild creature-of-the-night desire. Granted, it’s a relief that the show avoids jukebox-musical hit-mongering. In the process, it also avoids evoking the movie, the period or an overall sense of fun. That the famous sax player doesn’t ever bust out a solo during an actual song seems like a telling detail.

The limp songs are an early warning sign that The Lost Boys will reach for a more emotional conclusion than the material really supports. Some of its streamlining of the movie, with one particular character left out entirely, does help focus the show. Yet its eagerness to redirect those resources toward the repetitively dramatized concerns of parent Lucy diffuses some of the material’s youth-culture vitality (and darkness), as if fearful of alienating the over-40 crowd. The high production value of The Lost Boys may leave hipper audiences yearning for a firmer commitment to style over substance – rather than its ultimate choice of sap over style.

• Broadway
• US theater
• Theatre
• Musicals
• reviews