Broadway evaluation by Adam Feldman
Rating: ★★★★ (4 stars)
Ticketing: Buy tickets to The Lost Boys
Swooping in, tooth bared, on the shut of an anemic season for Broadway musicals, The Lost Boys is out for blood. Adapted from the 1987 coming-of-fangs movie about youngsters combating a vampire infestation in southern California, this present goals to set your pulse bounding; no different new tuner this season has been so formidable in scope or anyplace close to so spectacular in stagecraft. Director Michael Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffrey, whose previous collaborations embrace Maybe Happy Ending and A Christmas Carol, have once more created a world we’ve by no means seen onstage earlier than: shocking, thrilling, generally genuinely unsettling. The good issues about The Lost Boys are so good, actually, that they make its fumbles particularly irritating; there’s a sense of misplaced alternative. But to a powerful extent, the present succeeds the place earlier vampire-themed musicals—the satirically short-lived Dance of the Vampires, Dracula and Lestat—have merely sucked.
The title refers, partially, to a pair of teenage brothers in immortal peril: the rebellious Michael (LJ Benet), who rides a motorbike and wears a leather-based jacket, and the youthful and dorkier Sam (Benjamin Pajak), who likes comedian books and has a factor for Rob Lowe. With their newly single mom, Lucy (Shoshanna Bean), they’ve simply moved into a bizarre previous home in Santa Carla. What they don’t know is that this sunny fictional seashore city is “the murder capital of the world,” thanks to a different group of misplaced boys: a quartet of undead bloodsuckers led by the platinum-blond David (Ali Louis Bourzgui). The latter are a very darkish riff on the Lost Boys from Peter Pan—they by no means get previous, they’ll fly, they reject grownup authority—and Michael, like his Darling namesake in J.M. Barrie’s story, is drawn into their ranks.
In the film, Michael is tricked into turning into a vampire; within the musical he joins them by alternative. “I’m tried of wand’rin around,” he sings in what will be the most memorable tune within the rating by the indie-rock band the Rescues. “Been searching for something more / Something worth living for / I wanna belong to someone.” Michael isn’t searching for energy; what he actually desires is to “surrender control,” as a result of he’s on the run from one thing monstrous inside himself—an aftershock of the abuse he suffered from his father. Benet’s passionate, full-throated supply of the tune is a cry of wounded masculinity, rendered in musical phrases as a mixture of Nineteen Eighties epic rock and the extra trendy emotional balladry of, say, Lewis Capaldi (plus a pattern of the movie’s takeaway tune, “Cry Sister”). And David is drawn to him, partially, as a result of he has his personal unhealthy historical past with a father; there may be new depth to the quasi-homoerotic relationship between the 2 males, as triangulated through Star (Maria Wirries), a younger singer torn between them.
These are simply a few of the numerous enhancements that e book writers David Hornsby and Chris Hoch make to the movie. Lame characters have been minimize: the batty grandfather, the Artful Dodger–type waif, Sam’s loyal canine. Star, sorely underwritten within the authentic, now has a deeper connection to Michael and an affecting solo by which she laments being regularly caught within the crossfire of male violence: “I’m always in between / A match and gasoline / No matter what I choose / Everything will burn.” The vampires have develop into a rock band, which works completely—don’t fear, film followers, there may be nonetheless a cameo by the oiled-up sax player of the film—and David is a fuller character, incarnated with great vocal prowess and charismatic menace by Ali. (Watch for the flash of ecstatic ferocity that whips throughout his face when he makes his first onstage kill.) The mom of this Lost Boys is a drive to be reckoned with, too; Lucy is given a number of songs, impeccably delivered by Bean, that set up her as an oasis of humanity—particularly in one other of the rating’s highlights, “Wild,” by which she displays on her lack of everlasting youth whereas rotating on a merry-go-round on a date with the stuffy however affable Max (Paul Alexander Nolan), her employer on the native video retailer.
The elevated seriousness of the storytelling is matched by distinctive visuals. Laffrey’s set is a surprise of shifting vertical ranges: a three-tiered framework within the again, a two-floor home whose high story descends from the ceiling, a billboard touchdown, a primary flooring house that will be a boardwalk or a playground or an ironworks lair, and even a decrease stage within the orchestra pit. And that’s simply what occurred on the bottom: There are additionally many sequences of breathtaking flying results, by which performers flip, float and fly by means of the air. (The aerial design is by Gwyneth Larsen and Billy Mulholland; the choreography is by Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant.) The arresting lighting design by Jen Schriever and Arden performs a key function in these and different results all through. I discovered Adam Fisher’s sound design deafening—is it supposed so as to add to the sensory overwhelm, or possibly essential to masks set modifications?—however Ryan Parks’s costumes and David Brian Brown’s hair and wig design assist create a colourful and generally humorous Nineteen Eighties ambiance.
But right here’s the catch: By elevating its materials so persistently within the first act, The Lost Boys makes its subsequent change of tone all of the extra jarring. To some extent, this could possibly be anticipated: The same factor occurs within the movie, which was conceived as a Goonies-style tween-adventure comedy and reverted to that type increasingly because it went alongside (earlier than ending in geysers of gore). In Act Two, the musical strikes its focus to its youthful characters: Sam and his fellow comic-book nerds, the Frog Brothers (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka), who’ve beforehand served as comedian reduction. In the movie, Sam is gay-coded; the musical pulls an Alan Turing on that code, turning him overtly homosexual. That’s high-quality, besides it triggers a regrettable shift into the type of camp that The Lost Boys has in any other case well prevented. In a nod to his curiosity in comics, the present offers Sam two numbers that are intentionally cartoonish: one that includes corny previous vampire stereotypes in capes and slicked-back hair, the opposite with corny previous superheroes and, I’m afraid, an excellent cornier new message: “Maybe I can be a hero here / And make it cool to be queer / Maybe that’s my superpower.”
At intermission, The Lost Boys appeared like a residence run to me: a huge swing that linked. But the present’s depth, rooted in daring sincerity, is compromised by the abject silliness of the Sam numbers and the plague of Frogs that elsewhere overruns the second act. This could also be a perform of the very fact that the musical is premiering straight on Broadway, with out prior out-of-town runs; with extra growth time, the creators may need devised a second half equal to the primary. Instead, simply after they appear poised to faucet into the guts of the vampire musical, they again off and decrease the stakes.
The Lost Boys. Palace Theatre (Broadway). Book by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch. Music and lyrics by the Rescues. Directed by Michael Arden. With LJ Benet, Shoshana Bean, Ali Louis Bourzgui, Benjamin Pajak, Maria Wirries, Paul Alexander Nolan. Running time: 2hrs 35mins. One intermission.
Buy tickets to The Lost Boys: Broadway.com
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