The Lost Boys

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The minute I heard that the 1987 vampire thriller The Lost Boys was headed to Broadway, one thought hit me: this is one of those movie adaptations with absolutely no reason to sing. Ever since films became Broadway’s most reliable source material—tentatively in the 1970s, explosively in the 1990s—only a small subset has come from stories with zero show‑business DNA: no performers, no aspiring artists, no diegetic music, nothing that organically invites song. Big Fish, Groundhog Day, Edward Scissorhands, Waitress, Death Becomes Her, etc.—an odd little lineage of maybe a dozen titles, only a few of which became hits—force their stage versions to invent musical logic from scratch (or burlesque standards in a show like Titanique). The Lost Boys now joins that lineage, and not on its winning side.

The Lost Boys, like many mediocre films, somehow became a cult classic, but cult status doesn’t erase its origins as a glossy, adolescent creep‑fest about a gang of bloodsuckers posing as punk‑rock motorcyclists (here converted into a band) in the fictional California seaside town of Santa Carla. Our obsession with vampire books, TV series, movies, and theatre (there’s even a small Broadway subgenre of fang-sprouting shows) seems likely to inspire more such works unless box‑office returns drive a financial stake through their hearts. For now, these works, like Michael and Star in The Lost Boys, remain, like this defanged show, half dead and half alive.

If you know the movie, you can be reassured that the stage version, boisterously directed by Michael Arden, is generally faithful to it, with the usual alterations such transfers introduce. The Emerson family—attractive divorced mother Lucy (Shoshana Bean; Dianne Wiest on screen) and her sons, 17‑year‑old Michael (LJ Benet; Jason Patric) and 14‑year‑old Sam (Benjamin Pajak; Corey Haim)—leave Phoenix for Santa Carla, where they take up residence in the funky, TV‑less home of Lucy’s eccentric father. Played in the movie by Barnard Hughes, Grandpa doesn’t make it to Broadway, having recently died and been toasted to ashes, only to be swept up in a sight gag.

Michael, a James Dean‑like, rebellious, leather‑jacketed motorcycling teen, falls in with the bikers, led by Billy Idol‑like David (Ali Louis Bourzgui; Kiefer Sutherland), dyed blonde mullet and all (hair and wig design by David Brian Brown). Desperate to belong, he’s seduced by their devil‑may‑care behavior (drinking blood, dropping from a railroad trestle into foggy waters). Using flashbacks, David Hornsby and Chris Hoch’s script deepens Michael’s alienation by depicting him as the beaten son of a violently abusive father (Ben Crawford), none of which is in the movie.

The romance between Michael and beautiful groupie Star (Maria Wirries; Jami Gertz) remains intact, but their believability as adolescent lovers is on the same low level of credulity as in the flick. However—like 24-year-old James Dean’s Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause—the camera so loved the 21-year-old Jason Patric that it made up for the obvious age gap between actor and role. Benet gets the nod for singing chops, but there’s no contest in the charisma category.

Sam’s obsession with comic books, and his teaming up with local vampire-chasing kids Edgar and Alan Frog (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka; Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander), is also preserved, as is the budding romance between Lucy and politically conservative video‑store owner Max (Paul Alexander Nolan; Edward Herrmann), who turns out to have more bite than his modest persona suggests.

Despite the revisions—1980s’ Republicans become a dull running joke—The Lost Boys is, like its source, a banal, comic‑book‑level depiction of family dysfunction and B‑movie vampire‑thriller shallowness. Amped up to supersonic levels with loud, uninspired rock music by The Rescues, whose lyrics are often indecipherable, it seems even more inane in its new guise. Even the ballads can’t resist morphing into tear‑the‑house‑down anthems, no matter their underlying emotional simplicity, as in Lucy’s paean to her son, “Michael.”

And while its $25 million capitalization is evident in Ryan Park’s costumes and Dane Laffrey’s scenic spectacle of rising and falling elevator stages, traps, a multi‑tiered background, and other visual devices—enhanced by Jen Schriever and Michael Arden’s complex lighting sustaining the nighttime gloom—these can’t compensate for two and a half hours of musical dramedy so bloodless real vampires would ignore it.

Most striking among the visual gifts is the flying technology that allows the vampires to soar around the Palace’s vast stage in aerial sequences choreographed by Lauren Yalango‑Grant and Christopher Cree Grant. The couple also create the limited earthbound choreography, including a comic book superhero number that seems to have wandered in from another show. Still, the flying is nothing Broadway hasn’t seen before, especially after the advances made in 1954 by Peter Foy for Peter Pan. Closer in time, Spider‑Man: Turn Off the Dark even sent actors swooping over the spectators’ heads.

Shoshana Bean provides the most grounded, well‑sung performance in a cast filled with big voices and actors capable of satisfactory—if not especially memorable—performances. But for all the expense and effort, The Lost Boys is, to this observer, a lost cause.

The Lost Boys (open run)

Palace Theatre, 1564 Broadway at 47^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 22-730-8200 or visit http://www.lostboysmusical.com/tickets

Running time: two hours and 30 minutes including one intermission