ajhlovestheatre

THE LOST BOYS

Book by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch

Music and lyrics by The Rescues

based on the Warner Brothers film, story by James Jeremias and Janice Roberta Fischer

directed by Michael Arden

Palace Theatre, New York City – open-ended run

running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval 

https://www.lostboysmusical.com

In a Broadway season where the more prominent musical openings included the import from London of modest two-hander Two Strangers (Carry A Cake Across New York), a wan stage adaptation of Beaches, and the mighty, if historically troubled, Chess reduced to an over-choreographed concert on a unit set, there’s something satisfying about new tuner The Lost Boys swaggering in confidently at the eleventh hour to blast the Great White Way with bombast, staggering visuals and a pleasing conflation of budget and artistry. Its scale and ambition has just been rewarded with twelve Tony award nominations, the highest of any show this year, except Schmigadoon! which also managed a dozen nods.  

It’s not that The Lost Boys, directed by the award-winning Michael Arden (Once On This Island and Parade revivals, Maybe Happy Ending) and based on Joel Schumacher’s 1987 film blockbuster about teenage vampires terrorising a Californian coastal town, is a great musical – far from it.  However, it does represent a return to lavish production values that authentically go some way to justifying the eye-wateringly high Broadway seat prices, and there’s a palpable excitement around it borne of fans of the beloved original property thrilled to see their celluloid memories brought to thunderous theatrical life.

In a commendable case of giving the people what they want, Arden’s staging is chock-full of shuddering suspense, jump scares and eye-popping spectacle. Figures float and soar the full height of the Palace’s vast stage, which designer Dane Laffrey, probably the production’s single biggest star, fills with a multi-level set evoking a night time boardwalk garishly lit with multi-coloured bulbs and neon, abandoned warehouses and fairgrounds, a suspension bridge, a whole house…. Giant scenic pieces descend from the flies or burst through the floor, a working lift travels up and down, characters appear from apparently nowhere in the shadowy twilight, dry ice billows, and the titular boys slumber upside down like bats suspended high above the stage or engage in a balletic, enthralling motorbike race through the murky night (the aerial choreography, exceptional, is by Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant, while Arden and Jen Schriever are responsible for the stunning, shape-shifting lighting). 

Costume designer Ryan Park and hair/wigs creator David Brian Brown have wisely kept Tony nominee Ali Louis Bourzgui, inheriting Kiefer Sutherland’s macabre mantle as the Lost Boys’ leader David, in the peroxided mullet and black leather, and elsewhere produces 1980s styles that are vivid but a lot less parodic than they might  have been. Adam Fisher’s ear-splitting but generally effective sound design seems to owe more to stadium rock than musical theatre, but in a house and show this large, that doesn’t feel inappropriate.

So, technically then, this new musical is breathtaking, and if the score, which is surprisingly ballad heavy despite several numbers that really do rock, by LA-based band The Rescues, and David Hornsby and Chris Hoch’s book, were a bit stronger, and the second half didn’t have such a bewildering change in tone from the first (more on that shortly), The Lost Boys would be an absolute triumph. As it stands, it feels like a show that would have benefitted from an out-of-town tryout (although the complex production elements might have precluded this) or maybe another developmental workshop. The plot strands that should tug at the heartstrings (the mother and teenage boys escaping from an abusive patriarch, Maria Wirries’ semi-vampiric Star re-discovering her soul and conscience when she falls for Michael, the older of the sons, played by a suitably tortured L J Benet) plod along adequately but without ever becoming truly engaging, despite the efforts of the talented cast. 

Between the melancholic musings and endless belting, a degree of ennui sets in and you may find yourself waiting for the next piece of inventive visual extravagance or Bourzgui’s weird, malevolent charisma to reignite the night. The production certainly delivers on that front but the second act misguidedly attempts to have it both ways by suddenly becoming a big ole campfest, with results more irritating than delightful. Michael’s younger sibling Sam (a spirited Benjamin Pajak) falls in with the tiresome would-be vampire hunters the Frog brothers (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Dudak) and they perform a bizarre comedy number with multiple ensemble members done up as Mel Brooks-esque Draculas that seem to have slinked in from another show entirely. Young gay Sam also gets a lame coming-out number ‘Superpower’ with a selection of caped and masked superheroes in all the colours of the LGBTQ+ rainbow and that too feels like something that should have been cut in previews. 

It’s a shame because when the show works, it works extremely well. The always reliable, and golden-voiced, Shoshana Bean is hugely likeable as Lucy, the boys’ embattled mother. She makes something fine and touching out of ‘Wild’, the musical’s finest ballad, a soaring lament for lost youthful vitality, which Bean belts to the Palace’s rafters. Arguably the book’s most inspired deviation from the original screenplay is turning David and his gang into a locally revered rock band, and their anthemic opening banger ‘Have To Have You’, performed in front of a raucous mosh pit that rises out of the orchestra pit, is genuinely spine-tingling, especially as put over by the dynamic Bourzgui.

Benet and Wirries both field terrific voices and have just about enough presence and edge for their characters to cut through all the sound, sights and fury that constantly threatens to swallow individual figures whole. Paul Alexander Nolan initially seems wasted in the role of Lucy’s geeky new employer and potential suitor, but delivers an intense surprise that also, albeit too briefly, showcases his astonishing voice (his Jesus in the 2012 Broadway Superstar revival remains one of the most fearless and impressive I’ve ever seen). 

In all honesty, some of the effects are more likely to blow your mind if you haven’t seen Stranger Things: The First Shadow, currently playing right across Times Square from the Palace, but this is still a great-looking production. Individual elements (the souls of victims dropping silently into oblivion through the stage floor, the blind panic of a cop distracted from his investigative work by a mysterious force, the persistent defying of gravity by the undead gang members) linger longer in the mind than the overblown whole perhaps, but this is an undoubted crowdpleaser. Real musical theatre fans may be dismayed there aren’t more than half a dozen memorable tunes, but the sweep of the visual storytelling and sheer theatrical bravura go quite some way towards compensating, as does the star quality of Bourzgui.