‘The Lost Boys’ and the Art of Astonishment

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The spectacle is extraordinary. But does the musical itself rise to the same heights?

By Elizabeth Jia

Performance reviewed: October 25, 2026 | Palace Theatre, New York

NEW YORK — When the vampires drop from the bridge in The Lost Boys, the stage seems to open beneath them. One body disappears into darkness, then another. I knew I was watching a carefully controlled illusion. That knowledge was of remarkably little use.

The Lost Boys Playbill

Michael Arden’s Broadway adaptation of Joel Schumacher’s 1987 vampire film is full of such moments: a house descending into view, bodies suspended overhead, entire environments appearing before the last has quite registered. At the October 25 matinee, I was repeatedly astonished by the ingenuity of the staging. I was less consistently moved by the music.

The production opened at the Palace Theatre on April 26, 2026, and earned 12 Tony nominations and four wins, for featured actor Ali Louis Bourzgui, featured actress Shoshana Bean, scenic design and lighting design. Its achievements are substantial, but the awards do not settle the question of how well its parts work together.

With a book by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, the musical follows Lucy Emerson and her sons, Michael and Sam, as they seek a fresh start in the California town of Santa Carla. Michael finds a possible new family in a local rock band led by David. Belonging, it turns out, comes with rather more demanding conditions than he expected.

A stage that will not stand still

Dane Laffrey’s scenic design gives this world a remarkable sense of depth. The boardwalk, the family home, and the vampires’ lair emerge from a multilevel environment through which performers move both across the stage and above it. A two-story house comes into view; elsewhere, a walkway becomes the edge of an apparently limitless drop.

Before the show

The scale is impressive, but the transitions impressed me more. These are substantial pieces of scenery, yet their movement rarely interrupts the action. A change in light draws the eye elsewhere, and a new setting is already waiting when we look back. Jen Schriever and Arden’s lighting is crucial to that precision, determining what we see, what remains hidden, and how far the darkness seems to extend.

What stayed with me was the physical presence of the sets: their weight, their changing levels, the distance between one performer and another. Watching bodies negotiate this shifting space gives the apparent danger its force.

The bridge sequence makes the point most vividly. The vampires drop away one after another, disappearing so abruptly that the space beneath them seems bottomless. Elsewhere, performers hover, turn and hang upside down. Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant’s choreography and aerial choreography work alongside the aerial design of Gwyneth Larsen and Billy Mulholland. Their work makes flight look like a habit these creatures have acquired, rather than an accomplishment they are demonstrating.

On film, a cut can carry us from a ledge to a fall. Here, the body and the apparent void occupy the same room as the audience. The effect depends on that shared space, and on the uncomfortable pleasure of watching someone do what we know we would not dare.

Palace Theatre Memorabilia

The Palace offers a pleasing counterpart to all this movement. Opened in 1913, the theater has hosted Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli. It reopened in 2024 after a renovation that included raising its historic auditorium approximately 30 feet. Before the vampires took flight, the theater itself had already been lifted into the air.

A few days earlier, at a dress rehearsal of Omar at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the chorus had moved into the auditorium, bringing voices around us rather than leaving them entirely onstage. At The Lost Boys, my attention was drawn upward and into the stage’s depths. Two very different productions had made me newly aware of the room in which I was sitting.

The voices behind the spectacle

The October 25 matinee began nearly 20 minutes late, with Colin Trudell appearing as Michael in place of LJ Benet. Trudell handled the role with composure, although his pitch occasionally wandered in this performance.

Bourzgui’s David was the afternoon’s most compelling presence. His darkly textured rock vocals and assured movement give the character a seductive ease. He does not need to announce his authority; the stage seems to reorganize itself around him. David is very bad news. Bourzgui makes that seem less of a deterrent than it ought to be.

That appeal matters to the drama. Michael’s attraction to the gang becomes easier to understand when its leader can make danger look so desirable. I found David considerably more interesting than Michael, a preference that says as much about Bourzgui’s magnetism as it does about the balance between the characters.

Benjamin Pajak, 15, brings a different kind of assurance to Sam. His comic timing is unusually patient: he knows when to hold a beat and when to release it. The laughs feel earned rather than insistently requested.

Not all the singing was equally satisfying. Some first-act ensemble harmonies sounded unsettled to me. Bean’s second-act solo, by contrast, gave Lucy the vocal authority and emotional focus I had been waiting for. It was one of the moments when the music commanded my attention as completely as the scenery.

The Rescues’ score gives the production energy and captures the restlessness of adolescence. During the performance, it often swept me along. What I missed was the pleasure of leaving the theater with a beautiful melody still playing in my head. The bridge, the flying bodies, and the shifting sets remained vivid in my memory; the music did not linger in the same way.

Bourzgui’s performance and Bean’s second-act singing show how persuasive the production can be when musical expression and dramatic presence meet. I simply wished for more of those moments.

The price of staying young

Bourzgui’s David also sent my thoughts beyond the usual vampire references. His promise of eternal youth made me think of the supernatural figures in Chinese literature, and of how differently a story can define what it means to be human.

In Western vampire stories, immortality often raises a troubling question: What becomes of our humanity when we escape the natural limits of human life?

The vampire is frequently a figure who sacrifices something essential to the human condition in exchange for power, youth, or eternal existence.

Chinese supernatural literature often approaches the question from the opposite direction.

In some stories from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai Zhiyi), and in familiar romantic versions of The White Snake, spirits and other supernatural beings can display a capacity for love, loyalty, and self-sacrifice that surpasses that of the humans around them. The being labeled monstrous may turn out to be the more humane.

Neither tradition is uniform, and this is not a fixed division between East and West. What interests me is the reversal: one kind of story asks what a person loses by escaping the human condition; another asks how a being outside it might embody its finest qualities.

Seen that way, David’s offer begins to look less like liberation. His vampires seem trapped in the youth they have preserved, repeating their appetites without acquiring the freedom to move beyond them. They can live forever, but can they ever truly grow up? The title acquires a sadness that the swagger cannot quite conceal.

This was the production I carried out of the Palace: exhilarating to watch, less memorable to hear, and more suggestive in its treatment of youth than its rock-star vampires initially let on. My reservations about the score did not cancel the pleasure of being so thoroughly surprised.

And the show still had one surprise left.

Spoiler alert: The following paragraphs discuss the scene after the curtain call.

The cast had taken its bows. Then the lights dimmed again, and we were back in the vampires’ lair.

Mrs. Vasquez, whose police-officer husband is killed near the beginning of the story, appears. She finds the blood that had tempted Michael and raises it to her lips.

The curtain falls again.

The End … Or Is It?

I particularly appreciated the director’s decision to borrow the cinematic convention of a post-credits scene and adapt it for the live stage. The return to the opening death gives the final gesture a disturbing familiarity. We have seen where this temptation leads; she has not.

For a show that has spent so much effort making bodies fly and buildings move, it is a sly way to finish: with one small gesture and the possibility of another catastrophe.