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The Lost Boys: The Broadway musical that’s one of the year’s best movies. 5%
By Sam Adams26%
7/9/2026, 3:11:25 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 1 faulty reasoning type, including Attempt to Sell a Product or Service, with Attempt to Sell a Product or Service as the most egregious example at 2.4% saturation with 31 hits. Analysis detected 31 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,279 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 19.3% and a BS Rank of 5% (15,063 of 15,741 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 95.70% of the article peer group.
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It’s a long-standing Broadway tradition to shower recent Tony winners with entrance applause, and when I saw The Lost Boys at the Palace Theatre a couple of weeks after this year’s ceremony, Ali Louis Bourzgui and Shoshana Bean were met with whoops and hollers the instant they stepped onstage.
But not even the newly crowned winners for featured actor and actress in a musical could compete with the delighted clapping that erupted from the audience when the vampires began to fly.
Broadway musicals have regularly drawn on existing movies for their source material, especially as rising costs and a crowded marketplace have made familiar properties more appealing.
But it’s one thing when the movie is Mean Girls and another when it’s Back to the Future .
The latter adaptation, which opened in 2023, tried valiantly to faithfully replicate the movie’s climax on the Winter Garden’s stage, but when that climax involves frequent crosscutting and a stainless-steel car driving 88 mph, there’s only so much you can do without making audiences think about what they’re not seeing instead of being thrilled by what they are.
The movie on which the Broadway version of The Lost Boys is based isn’t as much of a technical tour de force as Robert Zemeckis’ time-travel classic, but if you remember anything from Joel Schumacher’s sleek, stylish film, it’s probably something visual: perhaps the scene when the vampires, a sultry, leather-clad quartet who have invaded the seedy boardwalk town of Santa Carla, hang from a fog-shrouded railroad trestle and drop, one by one, into the path of an oncoming train; or maybe just the moment when the head vampire, David (Kiefer Sutherland), hypnotizes the innocent newcomer Michael (Jason Patric) into believing that instead of chowing down on a takeout container of white rice, he’s actually eating maggots.
For Michael Arden, who directed and developed The Lost Boys ’ stage adaptation, the key was to replicate at least some of those visual moments without being handcuffed by them.
“There are these tentpole identifiers that people remember from the film that we knew we had to deliver on,” he told me last week, “but when you’re doing a musical, you’re demanded to deliver on a much more emotional level.”
There’s a saying that no one walks out of a show humming the scenery, and while The Lost Boys ’ three-story set, patterned on the deserted ironworks in which the vampires make their home, is jaw-dropping—Dane Laffrey won a well-deserved Tony for his scenic design—Arden was intent that the show create “a new visual landscape” rather than simply emulate the movie’s.
“It was like the world, but not a copy of the world,” he said.
Onstage, The Lost Boys playfully mimics the structure of a Hollywood movie: It’s got a title card, in the form of a glowing red logo that whips from floor to ceiling to goose the energy at the start of the show, and even a postcredits scene that cuts off the cast’s closing bows.
(It is, in a way, one of the best movies I’ve seen all year.)
But it doesn’t cater to the desire for CGI-assisted special effects the way, say, the stage version of Stranger Things does.
Arden proudly notes that there is “no video in the show”—presumably the opening clip of Ronald Reagan on a period-accurate TV doesn’t count—and says the production limited itself to the kinds of technologies that would have been available when the movie came out in 1987.
The system that lifts the actors into the air goes even further back.
It was created by Flying by Foy, the company whose founder made Mary Martin’s Peter Pan soar in the 1950s.
That’s not to say it looks old-fashioned.
The vampires don’t fly so much as float, swimming through the air as if gravity has simply lost track of their bodies.
And the trick is more astonishing because we know how it’s done, and yet we still can’t see it.
Part of it is that the lighting, by Arden and Jen Schriever, so effectively camouflages the wires that are holding the actors aloft.
(The pair shared a Tony for lighting design, bringing Arden’s total to six.)
But it’s also because the actors actually are flying, at least in a sense.
Wires or no, Bourzgui really is hanging 30 feet above the stage, doing midair somersaults with such weightless grace that your mind happily embraces the illusion.
(It doesn’t hurt, certainly, that Bourzgui, with his irresistible take on Sutherland’s Billy Idol sneer, is the one doing much of the selling.)
Some of The Lost Boys ’ most delightful effects, in fact, are also some of its simplest.
The show re-creates the movie sequence where the vampires challenge Michael to a nighttime motorcycle race by simply putting the cast on bikes facing the front of the stage and having them bounce, headlights tilting in unison as the gang leans into a curve.
It’s an almost comically crude technique, and yet it works as well as any high-tech video projection.
Better, even, because the lack of verisimilitude solicits the audience’s cooperation in a way more intensive and realistic approaches don’t.
“We’re really doing everything for real,” Arden explained, “because there’s nothing more exciting than being able to see the real texture onstage, to feel like you’re actually in the room with these people.
We weren’t just trying to do the most.
We were actually trying to create something incredibly tactile.”
In movies, the seamless invisibility of digital technology has made the willing suspension of disbelief all but obsolete.
Theatrical effects, however, still require the audience’s investment to complete the circuit.
Blockbuster productions like Stranger Things: The First Shadow use massive LED walls and 3D projections to bring movielike effects to the stage, but the effects are so impressive and immodest that they’re literally showstopping.
The Lost Boys has plenty of dazzling stagecraft, but it’s balanced with moments when the most advanced technology in sight is the playground spinner Bean and Paul Alexander Nolan whirl around on as they belt out “Wild,” especially once it becomes clear that the wheel is just going to stop wherever it stops.
Rather than hiding the artifice, Arden leans into it, embracing the goofy humor that sits alongside the moody seductiveness and monster-movie gore in Schumacher’s scattershot film.
For one thing, there’s an entire fantasy song in which Michael’s comic-book-obsessed younger brother, Sam (Benjamin Pajak), is serenaded by a chorus of brightly costumed superheroes.
And then there’s the moment when one of Sam’s friends enters his bedroom, which is staged on a second-story platform in the middle of the stage, through his closet door, and neither of the characters makes any note of it.
It’s purely ridiculous and utterly unexplained, and Arden is delighted that I singled it out.
“I knew we had to set up early on that there will be things that aren’t real,” he said.
“And I wanted to let the audience know that you’re allowed to laugh.
This is allowed to be absurd.
This is a show about vampires.”
The Lost Boys is absurd, but it’s absurd in the best way, the way that lets you know you’re just there to have the best time imaginable, logic and better judgment be damned.
All you have to do is believe.
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