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.)
