{"id":909597,"date":"2026-05-31T15:18:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T20:18:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/31\/the-lost-boys-broadway-review-or-why-frank-n-furter-gets-the-last-laugh\/"},"modified":"2026-05-31T15:18:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T20:18:11","slug":"the-lost-boys-broadway-review-or-why-frank-n-furter-gets-the-last-laugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/31\/the-lost-boys-broadway-review-or-why-frank-n-furter-gets-the-last-laugh\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Lost Boys\u2019 Broadway Review: Or, Why Frank-N-Furter Gets the Last Laugh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Music <\/p>\n

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It\u2019s not great news for your new vampire musical when a half-century-old vampire musical comes off a lot wilder.<\/p>\n

One of the delights of Frank-N-Furter in \u201cThe Rocky Horror Show\u201d is how he brought vampires out of the closet. Even Bram Stoker\u2019s \u201cDracula,\u201d written in 1897, possesses a strong same-sex subtext with its title character\u2019s attraction to Jonathan Harker. Those three female vampires residing in Dracula\u2019s castle are nothing more than the count\u2019s cover.<\/p>\n

Frank-N-Furter abandons any pretext of being straight. He creates a husband, Rocky, not a bride, and Frank only seduces Janet to get to Brad.<\/p>\n

Which brings us, finally, to \u201cThe Lost Boys,\u201d the new vampire musical that opened Sunday at the Palace Theatre. Its timing is not great. Only a few days ago, a fun new revival of \u201cThe Rocky Horror Show\u201d<\/a> opened on Broadway. The new Undead musical actually features two lead vampires. If you haven\u2019t seen the musical\u2019s source material, the 1987\u00a0movie of the same title, this review will respect your ignorance and not give away the story\u2019s big secret.<\/p>\n

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In the \u201cLost Boys\u201d stage musical, we know David (Ali Louis Bourzgui) is a major screaming bloodsucker from the get-go because he looks just like Kiefer Sutherland from the movie, right down to the bleach-blond hair. Even though David leads a rock band with three other male vampires \u2014 they all sleep together in an abandoned man-cave factory \u2014 book writers David Hornsby and Chris Hoch give David a beard. We know Star (Maria Wirries) is a beard because David (the vampire, not the book writer) pushes her into having an affair with the hot new boy toy in town, Michael (LJ Benet).\u00a0<\/p>\n

Michael has arrived in town with his mother, Lucy (Shoshana Bean), and young brother, Sam (Benjamin Pajak), after having been terrorized by an abusive husband-father (Ben Crawford). In the movie \u201cLost Boys,\u201d the mother (Dianne Wiest) is recently divorced. One of the musical\u2019s better ideas is to make this family of three on the run from the really bad dad, who shows up in Michael\u2019s nightmares. The family\u2019s fear and isolation fuels the musical\u2019s best songs.<\/p>\n

\"music
\u201cThe Lost Boys\u201d (Matthew Murphy)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Michael sings \u201cBelong to Someone\u201d when he contemplates joining David\u2019s gaggle of vampires. His mother sings \u201cWild\u201d to her new boyfriend (Paul Alexander Nolan) when she reminisces about a life before her ex-husband. Benet and Bean are both in great singing voice, and, fortunately, both songs are keepers, written by The Rescues, an L.A. rock band that has written music for a few TV series, including \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Rescues (Kyler England, Adrianne \u201cAG\u201d Gonzalez and Gabriel Mann) make an auspicious Broadway debut, but for every \u201cBelong to Someone\u201d and \u201cWild\u201d they deliver a real clunker. Star\u2019s big solo, \u201cWar,\u201d is a female power ballad that\u2019s pushed into being a declaration of, yes, war. Wirries\u2019 Star emerges as the town\u2019s most tiresome beard, and she deserves Benet\u2019s Michael, who runs the emotional gamut from angry to angst.<\/p>\n

The show ends with the anthem \u201cIf We Make It Through the Night.\u201d It succeeds in turning the nun\u2019s anthem \u201cClimb Every Mountain\u201d from \u201cThe Sound of Music\u201d into something very cutting edge.<\/p>\n

Michael Arden directs \u201cThe Lost Boys\u201d as if it were an obstacle course I would not wish on any contestant of \u201cWipeout.\u201d Even the Met Opera hasn\u2019t used this many elevators to facilitate scene changes. Much scarier than the vampires is that set: will somebody fall into an elevator shaft, be crushed by a descending living room? Dane Laffrey\u2019s scenic design can best be described in two words, \u2018dangerous\u2019 and \u2018humongous.\u2019<\/p>\n

That aesthetic is contagious. Arden takes a relatively innocuous but sweet song, \u201cSuperpower,\u201d and supersizes it. Sam tells us that young gay guys (those few who are not vampires) can be heroes, too. Pajak is a charming performer, and while he could handle the number on his own, Arden mucks up it with a lot of choristers dressed up as comic-book characters (garish costumes by Ryan Park).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Lost Boys\u201d doesn\u2019t know what it wants to be: a shocker, a tear-jerker or a parody. We\u2019re supposed to find the vampire gang frightening, but at one point Arden sends Ronald Reagan, dressed up as Dracula, across the stage.<\/p>\n

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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Music It\u2019s not great news for your new vampire musical when a half-century-old vampire musical comes off a lot wilder. One of the delights of Frank-N-Furter in \u201cThe Rocky Horror Show\u201d is how he brought vampires out of the closet. Even Bram Stoker\u2019s \u201cDracula,\u201d written in 1897, possesses a strong same-sex subtext with its title […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":909598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[131522],"class_list":["post-909597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business-news","tag-podcast-music"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/909598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}