We round up the reviews for the latest musical to head to the Broadway stage, based on the film.
TheaterMania.com: “After the breathtaking Act 1 closer (“Secret Comes Out”), two navel-gazing ballads (Star’s “War” and Lucy’s “Michael”) slam the brakes on the great momentum Arden has built. But 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. When the music didn’t grab me, the special effects did: Watching Michael fall back from the train tracks high above the stage into the empty air during his first flight gave me the absolute chills.”
The Guardian: “The limp songs are an early warning sign that The Lost Boys will reach for a more emotional conclusion than the material really supports. Some of its streamlining of the movie, with one particular character left out entirely, does help focus the show. Yet its eagerness to redirect those resources toward the repetitively dramatized concerns of parent Lucy diffuses some of the material’s youth-culture vitality (and darkness), as if fearful of alienating the over-40 crowd.”
Time Out: “At intermission, The Lost Boys seemed like a home run to me: a big swing that connected. But 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.”
Exeuntnyc.com: “If you like your musicals to run on an engine of bigger, louder, faster, MORE, The Lost Boys is for you. Dane Laffrey’s set is a mechanical marvel that not only stretches up three full stories into the heights of the Palace Theatre’s fly space and includes a functioning elevator but creates a sunken level, often sinking with actors on it, and Michael Arden’s production fills all of that vertical space ingeniously, usually operating on at least two levels at once.”
NY Times: “Because, my children, tonight the design freaks feast. “The Lost Boys” contains the finest spectacle I’ve seen this season outside of the Met Opera: Laffrey’s set consists of a three-tiered brick arcade, a series of arched passageways leading back into shadow, full of cunning secrets — an ornate old elevator, a jillion sliding staircases, a two-story house. There are as many ways to fall into it as to rise, weightlessly, on wires above it. The Palace is a huge Broadway stage, yet Arden and his team make us aware of how much more space is surrounding it that we cannot see. It’s a bit like that moment in the ocean when you realize, oh, there are miles of water down there.”
Variety: “But this stunner of a show, based on the Joel Schumacher film, is a solid theatrical transformation, rich in imagination, humor and heart — and with spectacular special effects.”
Entertainment Weekly: “The Lost Boys is a big and bold production marrying technical enchantment with a talented cast of vocal heavyweights. Even if a few elements of this vampire love story remain a bit undercooked, it’s definitely worth sinking your teeth into.”
Slant Magazine.com: “Nobody’s flying just then, but The Lost Boys, with its addictive sense of whimsical wonder, is soaring all on its own.”
amNewYork: “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.”
To find out more about the musical visit: https://www.lostboysmusical.com/