The stage signage announces the year is 1987, at which point the audience will explode in applause, because the 80’s were awesome. Schumacher’s The Lost Boys film was another perfect example. Finally leaving her abusive husband, Lucy Emerson packed up her stuff and her sons, the older Michael and younger Sam, moving to Santa Clara, where she inherited her father’s house. Yes, that’s right, Grandpa (Barnard Hughes in the movie) is already dead. That doesn’t bode well for the family’s general survival—and obviously someone else must presumably deliver the film’s unforgettable final line.
Both brothers are happy to be rid of their father, but are skeptical of Santa Clara—with good reason, judging from all the missing children’s posters. However, Michael immediately warms to the town when he meets Star, a pretty vocalist, whose relationships with her biker bandmates and running mates are clearly strained.
As the self-proclaimed vampire hunters, the Frog Brothers soon explain to Sam, their fellow geek, Santa Clara is a hotbed of vampire activity. Star happens to be recently turned, but she still refuses to kill and feed on humans. Clearly, she also likes Michael, so David turns him too, in hopes that they both will accept the predatory realities of vampire existence together. David is indeed the leader of the biker gang, but not necessarily the vampire-prime, who created the Santa Clara clan.
As predictable as the rising sun, book writers David Hornsby and Chris Hoch had to make changes with a screenplay so successful that it spawned two straight-to-DVD sequels, multiple comic book sequels, and this Broadway musical, so they could “put their stamp” on the beloved property. Yet, their original deviations represent the show’s weakest elements. Perhaps their oddest innovation was reconceiving the Frog Brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander in the original) as an apparent boy and girl, who still insist on calling themselves the “Frog Brothers.” Yet, with no explanation provided and no clearcut gender-identity messaging, it just leads to needless moments of confusion, for both characters on-stage and the audience alike.
Likewise, the Reagan jokes fall flat. Again, this is rather ill-advised on the part of Hornsby and Hoch, since the bedrock audience for The Lost Boys grew up in the 1980s and subsequently judged every successive President against the standard he set.
However, the musical and technical craftmanship devoted to the production is extraordinarily impressive. The sets and special effects truly deliver the bang for your Broadway buck. In fact, Arden and his tech team brilliantly recreate the bridge scene from the movie. Arguably, this production ranks with the spectacle of the King Kong and Spider-Man shows. (Unfortunately, one of the preview performances, on which this review is based, experienced technical difficulties, somewhat like those that plagued the latter production, which resulted in an extra ten-minute break—but the eye-popping visuals were worth the wait.)
Broadway veteran Shoshana Bean (who replaced Idina Menzel in Wicked) also solidly anchors the production as Mother Lucy. She also delivers the film’s cleverest song, “The Kind Rewind,” which subtly name-drops dozens of 1980s film titles, like “Witness” and “9 to 5.”
Most importantly, the production fully embraces Schumacher’s sexy rock & roll vision of vampirism. You get money’s worth of flying, swooning, and crooning undead. Highly recommended for the music and the effects, The Lost Boys is now officially open on Broadway.