Has The Lost Boys Broken Broadway’s Vampire Curse?
The $25M production of The Lost Boys opened to mostly strong reviews, with its performances, spooky effects, and visual design getting high praise.
By Robert Nesti
21st Century Broadway has had a vampire curse. It began in 2002 with Dance of the Vampires, which despite starring the Phantom himself – Michael Crawford – lost $12M. Two years later Frank Wildhorn tried to duplicate his Jekyll and Hyde success by musicalizing another Victorian horror classic – Dracula. The critics put a stake in its heart and it closed after 154 performances, though a Wildhorn’s revised version has been an international hit. Then in 2006, Elton John teamed with his long-time songwriting partner Bernie Taupin for their first theatrical collaboration: Lestat, based on the Anne Rice bestselling sequel to Interview With a Vampire. One critic called it “a musical sleeping pill” and it closed after 39 performances. A cast album was recorded, but John was so disappointed by the show’s failure, he blocked its release.
But has The Lost Boys broken the curse? Based on Joel Schumacher’s 1987 horror-comedy cult classic, it follows what happens when a divorced mom and her two sons move to a seaside California town that seems perfect, except for its unusually high quotient of missing teenagers. From the reviews it appears to have. But capitalized at $25M, the musical will need to achieve blockbuster status and earn between $1.1M and $1.2M a week to make a weekly profit. During its preview period, it never broke the $1M mark; but that may have been strategic with ticket prices scaled downward to build word-of-mouth, which has been largely positive.
If the Outer Circle nominations are any indication, the show will likely do well when the Tony Award nominations are announced on May 5. It received 11, including , Outstanding New Broadway Musical; Outstanding Featured Performer in a Broadway Musical: Ali Louis Bourzgui and Benjamin Pajak; Outstanding Direction of a Musical: Michael Arden; Outstanding Book of a Musical: David Hornsby and Chris Hoch; Outstanding Score: The Rescues; Outstanding Orchestrations: Ethan Popp and The Rescues; Outstanding Scenic Design: Dane Laffrey; Outstanding Costume Design: Ryan Park; Outstanding Lighting Design: Jen Schriever and Michael Arden; and Outstanding Sound Design: Adam Fisher.
What The Lost Boys has going for it is a brand name, its evocative horror element, its subtext of teen alienation and belonging, which are echoed in the current hit The Outsiders; its strong cast; its pop score; and its design elements, which one critic called the most spectacular this side of the Metropolitan Opera with gravity-defying aerial choreography.
Here are some synopses of the critics’ reviews:
REVIEW SCORECARD:
GOOD 10
BAD 2
MIXED 8
Bobby McGuire ● 1 Minute Critic
McGuire opens by describing a Broadway season parched for a blockbuster new musical — “a dry, listless hunger like a vampire who’s been stuck in a coffin since last season’s Tonys.” His conclusion: the show delivers exactly what the season has been missing. He praises director Michael Arden’s “alternately operatic and tongue-in-cheek staging” and Dane Laffrey’s “immense, multi-level set,” while calling Ali Louis Bourzgui’s David “intoxicating.” The score’s over-reliance on ballads earns a mild rebuke, but ultimately, McGuire declares that “The Lost Boys have broken the curse. Finally, a vampire musical that doesn’t suck. And in a lackluster season desperate for a hit, that’s a lifeline.”
Matt Windman ● amNY
Windman delivers the sharpest dissent in the critical pack. Recalling how three vampire musicals — Dance of the Vampires, Dracula, and Lestat — crashed and burned on Broadway when he was in college, he argues that Broadway has learned nothing. He finds LJ Benet’s Michael “moody but blank,” considers Ali Louis Bourzgui’s David lacking in lasting impact, and judges the show “worse than all of them.” His parting verdict: “If nothing else, The Lost Boys feels like a warning. Broadway cannot keep pouring enormous resources into oversized adaptations of middling films with generic pop scores and expect better results.”
Brian Scott Lipton ● Cititour
Lipton acknowledges that the show has a very appealing cast, notes that Shoshana Bean sings “Michael” and “Wild” stunningly, and credits several visually impressive sequences — but is left wanting more. Despite Benet being a vocal powerhouse, he observes that Michael never gets a solo, and that a rather obvious twist undermines the finale. His conclusion lands in ambivalence: “While many audiences may have found what just they’re looking for in The Lost Boys, the musical still feels like a lost opportunity to be as good as it should be. It simply needs more teeth and more bite!”
Chris Jones ● The Chicago Tribune
Jones frames the season itself as an apt setup for a vampire musical. He opens by noting that “the flow of boffo new Broadway musicals has been so anemic this season that there is something apropos about the 2026-27 slate concluding with The Lost Boys, a musical about vampires.” He concedes that the show is superior to the notorious Dance of the Vampires and Elton John’s Lestat, which played this very theatre — while leaving room for reservations about the material itself
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David Cote ● Cote Notices
Cote captures his own surprise at leaving the theatre having had fun: “I never expected to leave a musical about undead bloodsuckers thinking, ‘That was kind of fun.’ Maybe when the world is run by actual ghouls and fiends, when our phones drain our will to live at night, it feels good to stick the platelet-sipping devils center stage and make them sing, then cheer as they burn to dust at dawn.” But he finds the broader thematic ambitions undercut by the book. Arden’s expert direction signals Reagan-era themes of the heterosexual nuclear family as bulwark against the “degenerate and unseemly,” yet “the book boils it down to trite messaging.”
Thom Geier ● Culture Sauce ★★★★☆
Geier calls The Lost Boys “the most spectacular surprise of the Broadway season — a visually captivating show that actually improves on its source material with more fleshed-out characters, a more coherent plot, and a hook-filled rock score.” He praises the score by The Rescues as “an accomplished blend of ’80s rock pastiche, power ballads, and show tunes that frequently operate on multiple levels at once,” with “some absolute bangers.” In a nod to the show’s multiplex origins, he highlights a Broadway first: “a post-credit scene that begins after the final curtain call,” calling it “one of many final gambits that elevate The Lost Boys into something special.”
Greg Evans ● Deadline
Evans leads with a simple verdict: the show is “killer fun,” declaring that “nightmare memories of Lestat, Dracula the Musical and Dance of the Vampires fade like twilight within minutes of The Lost Boys‘ opening bite.” He singles out Ali Louis Bourzgui as the production’s indispensable element — “his deep, mellifluous voice gliding from purr to growl to rock-and-roll shriek” — adding that it is “no overstatement to say The Lost Boys just wouldn’t work without him.” The score by The Rescues “puts one in mind of the rock-based sounds of Dead Outlaw, sometimes even Stereophonic. Not bad company at all.”
Dalton Ross ● Entertainment Weekly
Ross describes what awaits audiences as “a massive spectacle with tinges of both horror and humor, yet wrapped in a whole lot of heart.” Though conceding that certain elements of the vampire love story remain undercooked, he ultimately finds it “a big and bold production marrying technical enchantment with a talented cast of vocal heavyweights” and declares it “definitely worth sinking your teeth into.”
Caroline Cao ● New York Theatre Guide
Cao opens with a vivid image of Ali Louis Bourzgui rising within the “titanic Palace Theatre,” calling his David so magnetic that he “could hypnotize you into baring your neck for his fangs.” But she finds the overall production tonally inconsistent. The new book adds “a consciousness of queerness and patriarchal violence, but like its conflicted half-vampires, The Lost Boys loiters in limbo between an ’80s nostalgia and uneven novelty.” She recommends the show primarily to fans of the film and vampire media broadly.
Johnny Oleksinski ● The New York Post
Oleksinski wastes no time: “At long last, a vampire musical that doesn’t suck. A captivating and moody rock show about teenage fangst, The Lost Boys flew open Sunday night at the Palace Theatre and brought an end to the decades-old curse unleashed by a string of unfortunate” flops. The Post’s headline calls it the best new musical on Broadway — a verdict the critic appears to fully endorse.
Helen Shaw ● The New York Times
Shaw is rhapsodic about the production values, calling it “the finest spectacle I’ve seen this season outside of the Met Opera” and describing Laffrey’s set as “a three-tiered brick arcade, a series of arched passageways leading back into shadow, full of cunning secrets.” Yet she ends with a measure of frustration. While The Lost Boys seemed “like a home run” at intermission, the show’s “intensity, rooted in daring sincerity, is compromised by the abject silliness of the Sam numbers and the plague of Frogs that elsewhere overruns the second act.” She attributes the imbalance to the show’s lack of an out-of-town tryout.
New York Stage Review (Frank Scheck, Roma Torre)
Frank Scheck ★★★☆☆
Scheck opens with a wry concession: “The Lost Boys is the best Broadway vampire musical yet” — though he is quick to note that is “grading on a curve.” He credits Michael Arden’s “imaginative” staging and acknowledges that the show should satisfy its target audience, while pointing out that the ballad-heavy pop-rock score by The Rescues represents newcomers to the musical theatre form.
Roma Torre ★★★☆☆
Torre finds the production’s aerial sequences “sensational,” and praises the topnotch production values and excellent cast — but argues that the storytelling falters. She notes that the show’s tone “toggles between jokey sitcom and deadly serious,” and that “the two opposing styles tend to neutralize each other, rendering the show neither funny enough nor creepy enough to fully cast the intended spell.”
Dave Quinn ● People
Quinn acknowledges the spectacle but finds the musical doesn’t sustain it: “Spectacle can only carry a musical so far… Nearly every number arrives at the same emotional temperature: loud, intense and sung at full blast.” He faults the show’s narrative shortcuts, writing that “in its rush to keep momentum high, the musical often takes narrative shortcuts that leave characters underdeveloped,” concluding that “the result is a show that loses its center just when the stakes should be sharpening.”
Dan Rubins ● Slant Magazine
Rubins opens by acknowledging the genre’s graveyard of failures, then admits that The Lost Boys is “more visually jaw-dropping and effortlessly cool than it has any right to be.” But he finds the book’s more earnest gestures strained. He argues that making Sam’s queerness so explicit actually feels “more dated than anything in the film,” praising Benjamin Pajak as “the best kid on Broadway since the 2022 Music Man” while noting the character is “saddled with singing that maybe he ‘can make it cool to be queer.’”
Pete Hempstead ● TheaterMania
Hempstead is among the show’s most ardent supporters, calling it “the best new musical on Broadway” and declaring that it “has at last lifted the curse and reclaimed the Palace Theatre (and Broadway) for the vamps.” He praises Hornsby and Hoch’s book for “excavating the film’s subtext: the search for a family,” and singles out Bourzgui as “deliciously wicked.” His one complaint: after the “breathtaking Act 1 closer,” two “navel-gazing ballads” in Act 2 briefly stall the momentum Arden has built — though “that’s the worst I can say about a show that had me by the throat for the rest of its two hours and 40 minutes.”
Andrew Martini ● Theatrely
Martini opens by crediting the show’s high-adrenaline launch: “The Lost Boys starts with a bang,” delivering “jaw-dropping sets and special effects, jump scares, and a funhouse of surprises for fans of the movie and newcomers alike.” He notes that the creative team has “cleverly massaged the original’s plot to translate it to the stage,” and praises Shoshana Bean’s Lucy for taking the family out of “an abusive home.” His overall assessment — captured in the review’s headline — is that it’s “one bloody good time.”
Adam Feldman ● Time Out New York ★★★★
Feldman praises the show as the season’s most ambitious new musical, with Arden and Laffrey having “created a world we’ve never seen onstage before: surprising, thrilling, sometimes genuinely unsettling.” He details Laffrey’s set as “a wonder of shifting vertical levels,” with breathtaking flying effects — though he notes the sound design is “deafening.” His frustration: despite the show seeming like “a home run” at intermission, the second act’s momentum is undermined, and “just when they seem poised to tap into the heart of the vampire musical, they back off and lower the stakes.”
Frank Rizzo ● Variety
Rizzo calls the show “a stunner” and “a solid theatrical transformation, rich in imagination, humor and heart — and with spectacular special effects,” predicting it should break the genre’s curse. He praises Arden as returning “in top form” and describes an “epic-yet-elegant production that lives up to the MTV-stylish film that became a Gen X favorite.” While acknowledging that the show could have benefited from out-of-town development — particularly a “troublesome second act” — he nonetheless argues it “should satisfy longtime fans and be an attractive sell for a younger market.”
Robert Hofler ● The Wrap
Hofler’s headline tips his hand: the subtitle invokes Rocky Horror‘s Frank-N-Furter and the suggestion that the more iconic vampire musical has the last laugh. He argues that The Lost Boys is tonally lost: “It doesn’t know what it wants to be: a shocker, a tear-jerker or a parody.” He finds the production big and loud but lacking the daring theatrical identity that might have made it truly memorable. t