Last night I saw The Lost Boys, the new Broadway musical based on the 1987 Joel Schumacher film about California vampires.
The show opens with a television clip of Ronald Reagan discussing family values, setting up this adaptation as all about family. The central family of the story consists of newly single mom Lucy (Shoshana Bean) and her two sons Michael (LJ Benet) and Sam (Benjamin Pajak).
Old-fashioned family values are represented not just by Reagan, but by Michael and Sam's abusive father, who appears ghost-like in scenes, reminding us of the trauma our families can sometimes inflict. Also championing traditional values is Max (Paul Alexander Nolan), the Goldwater-loving video store owner who hires and then romances Lucy.
Opposing the idea of a traditional family is the non-traditional family formed by the vampires, who call each other brother and live together in harmony when they aren't out slaughtering the locals. Ali Louis Bourzgui plays David, the charismatic frontman for an all-vampire band that plays driving rock music and tries to tempt Michael away from his human family.
After he drinks vampire blood but has not yet made his first kill, Michael is trapped in between, as a half-vampire not fully belonging to either world. In this respect, he is like Star, played by Maria Wirries, who is alienated from the traditional world and has lost her family, but has her eyes wide open to the harm being inflicted by the outsider vampires.
The band The Rescues provided a rocking score for this musical, which has a book written by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, two former college roommates from Carnegie Mellon University. Michael Arden (who previously directed Maybe Happy Ending) directed the piece.
The Lost Boys is more polished (and more mainstream) than Blood/Love, the other big vampire musical to open in New York this year. It's also less earnest and leans more into a camp sensibility. However, I thoroughly enjoyed both shows.
