The prologue to “The Lost Boys,” the new musical adaptation of the 1987 Warner Bros. film now at the Palace Theatre, immediately signals Michael Arden’s dark ambitions for this material. A police officer investigates the abandoned Coronado Ironworks factory by flashlight, interrupted by Ronald Reagan’s voice on a flickering television extolling “the strength and integrity of the family.” Before the officer can process the irony, The Lost Boys descend from above, feeding on him as a giant glowing red sign rises and the rock band aesthetic takes over. It’s film noir meets MTV, and Arden’s staging suggests this will be more than nostalgia—this is a vampire musical with teeth. The opening number “No More Monsters” introduces the Emerson family—single mother Lucy (Caissie Levy) and teenage sons Michael (LJ Benet) and Sam (Benjamin Pajak)—fleeing Phoenix and an abusive father for a fresh start in Santa Carla, California. The boys’ promise to leave monsters behind feels ironic given where they’re headed, and Michael’s confession that he feels trapped in his family and wonders how he fell so far from the tree foreshadows his vulnerability to the teenage vampires he will soon encounter and their seductive offer of chosen brotherhood. Fasten your seatbelts.

The Emerson family—single mother Lucy and sons Michael (17) and Sam (14)—flee their abusive father in Phoenix, arriving at dead Grandpa’s eccentric Santa Carla house filled with taxidermy and no television. Lucy lands a job at VideoMax, charmed by owner Max’s movie-buff earnestness. Michael escapes to the boardwalk where he meets Star, a mysterious young woman connected to David and The Lost Boys, a charismatic vampire rock band. Sam encounters the militaristic Frog Brothers—Edgar and Alan, teenage self-appointed vampire hunters who warn that Santa Carla is the “Murder Capital of the World.” David seduces Michael with an offer of belonging and family, bonding over their shared experience of abusive fathers. When David offers Michael a chalice of blood, Michael drinks, becoming a half-vampire. The Lost Boys take him flying in an ecstatic sequence under a railroad trestle. The act ends with Michael’s transformation revealing itself violently: hallucinating his father, he attacks Sam with a baseball bat, then crashes through the bedroom window.

Sam realizes Michael is a vampire. The Frogs explain the only cure: kill the Head Vampire and all half-vampires revert to human. After mistakenly suspecting Max (who passes all vampire tests), the kids raid the Lost Boys’ lair at the abandoned Coronado Ironworks and stake Marko—but the remaining vampires attack the Emerson house in retaliation. Sam kills Dwayne with garlic salt and a crossbow, the Frogs drown Paul in holy water, and Michael and Star stake David. Yet Star and Michael don’t transform back—David wasn’t the Head Vampire. When Lucy and Max return from their date, Max reveals himself as the true Head Vampire who wanted Lucy as mother to his vampire sons. Lucy approaches Max as if surrendering, then stakes him with Grandpa’s carved wooden cross. The family survives, Star is freed from her curse, and the Frogs join them for breakfast as found family. An epilogue after bows shows Mrs. Vasquez (the missing cop’s widow) discovering the vampire lair and raising the chalice to her lips—suggesting the cycle continues.

Lucy, Michael, and Sam’s fractured family conflicts mirror those of the vampire “family”—teenage Lost Boys David, Marko, Dwayne, and Paul with their controlling “Dad” Max (Paul Alexander Nolan). Michael Arden directs this dual-family structure with surgical precision, navigating the show’s tonal shifts between camp horror and genuine trauma. Where the 1987 film ricocheted between teen comedy and blood-soaked thriller, Arden finds coherence in the throughline of abuse and belonging: Michael’s bruises from his Phoenix father make him vulnerable to David’s seductive promise of a new one.

Arden’s direction draws committed performances from his ensemble. Caissie Levy’s Lucy carries the weight of a mother who stayed too long with an abusive husband, leaving her sons scarred by both their father’s violence and her own failed protection. LJ Benet and Benjamin Pajak as brothers Michael and Sam embody different responses to trauma: Michael’s bruised defiance and Sam’s queer-coded vulnerability to schoolyard cruelty. Both are running from monsters they hope Santa Carla will leave behind.

The musical’s second song “Lose Yourself/Have to Have You” (music and lyrics by The Rescues) charts Michael’s escape to the boardwalk where he encounters Star and The Lost Boys. Michael confesses his desire to drown out the voices in his head with noise, to disappear into the crowd and lose himself—a plea that makes him easy prey for David’s seductive promise of belonging. Michael meets Star in an ear-piercing shop and instantly decides he needs to have her. Maria Wirries’s Star is both seductive and needy. She easily convinces Michael she can do the piercing as she escorts him to see the Lost Boys play in their band. Lost Boy leader David (Ali Louis Bourzgui, radiating dangerous charisma) pulls Star up onto the stage, then locks eyes with Michael in the crowd, and Bourzgui plays the homoerotic subtext explicitly—this vampire wants Michael as much as Michael wants Star.

Lucy urges Michael not to go out at night, then heads to the boardwalk with Sam to search for him. Caissie Levy gives her Lucy the burden of guilt for failing to protect her sons from their father’s abuse, while also projecting a tentative hope for this California fresh start. After a brief encounter with the distraught Mrs. Vasquez (Ashley Jenkins), she meets Max (Paul Alexander Nolan, congenial yet faintly menacing) who offers her a job at his videocassette store.

Sam meets Edgar and Alan at the comic bookstore. Both Edgar Frog (a nerdy and intense Miguel Gil) and Alan Frog (Jennifer Duka, in a smart gender-nonconforming casting choice) are fourteen years old and diehard vampire fighters who warn Sam that Santa Carla is a town where the undead run the murder capital of the world and he is in mortal danger. Brian Flores’s Marko, Sean Grandillo’s Dwayne, and Dean Maupin’s Paul bring athletic menace and rock-star swagger to the vampire pack, functioning as a Greek chorus of temptation in Act One before becoming genuine threats in the Act Two siege.

The success of “The Lost Boys” owes much to Dane Laffrey’s ambitious scenic design, which navigates multiple locations—the Emerson house, VideoMax, the boardwalk, a comic book store, and a French restaurant representing “normal” life, contrasted against the supernatural spaces of the Coronado Ironworks lair, a clifftop billboard, and the fog-shrouded trestle bridge. These rapid shifts might prove challenging for some designers, but Laffrey along with lighting designers Jen Schriever and Michael Arden, and sound designer Adam Fisher make these shifts seamlessly and realistically. Ryan Park’s costume design captures the 1987 setting while distinguishing the vampires’ leather-and-denim rock aesthetic from the Emersons’ more grounded wardrobe—Lucy’s ex-hippie practicality, the Frogs’ army-surplus intensity, and Max’s buttoned-up video-store proprietor respectability all tell their stories before a word is spoken. Gwyneth Larsen and Billy Mulholland’s aerial design makes stage flight exhilarating. The Lost Boys and Michael soar across the set with the greatest of ease.

The Rescues’ score serves the story with emotional precision, though some numbers function better as drama than others. The most devastating moment comes in “Belong to Someone,” the second part of Michael’s initiation sequence. Here, Michael and David exchange hopes and dreams in a duet that is both homoerotic and achingly vulnerable. Both boys are lost and desperate to belong to someone who will bring them back to life—the living and the undead. Michael confesses he wants someone to be his everything, to keep him from unraveling. At that moment, that someone is David. This level of tenderness makes the Frogs’ later determination to kill David and his family feel tragically hollow.

The possessive flip side of belonging surfaces in “You Belong to Me” during Max’s final confrontation, when the Head Vampire’s claim of ownership reveals what David’s offer of family always concealed—control masquerading as connection. The remaining Lost Boys fall into a fiery pit as Max insists that Michael and Sam belong to him, underscoring the show’s anxiety about chosen families that exist outside maternal authority.

The finale, “If We Make It Through the Night,” celebrates the survival of the reconstituted Emerson family—now including the Frogs and Star. Yet when The Lost Boys reappear with the ensemble for this number, I felt an eerie dissonance. Had they, too, somehow made it through the night? The staging suggests redemption the book refuses to grant them, leaving a haunting question the show can’t quite answer.

At its heart, “The Lost Boys” wrestles with competing visions of family. The show champions the idea of chosen bonds—Sam finds brotherhood with the Frogs, Star is welcomed into the Emerson fold, and the finale celebrates this expanded circle. Yet the musical stumbles over its own ideology when it comes to the vampires themselves. The show asks us to celebrate the deaths of Marko, Dwayne, and Paul—but I found myself unsettled by their violent ends. These weren’t monsters; they were boys, likely victims of Max’s predation themselves, who formed their own family in the margins. The musical’s moral universe can’t imagine saving them alongside Michael, can’t see their chosen brotherhood as worthy of redemption. In a show that champions found family, the Lost Boys’ deaths reveal an uncomfortable truth: only certain families—those centered on maternal or biological bonds—are worth fighting for.

This contradiction speaks to the show’s larger struggle with its vampire metaphor. David offers Michael exactly what the finale celebrates: escape from an abusive father, artistic mentorship (the guitar lesson his real father refused), healing (Michael’s bruise literally vanishes), and unconditional acceptance. “You can’t choose your family? I say they’re wrong,” David tells him. Yet the musical frames this as predation rather than liberation. Why is Lucy adding the Frogs and Star to her family beautiful, but Max wanting to create a new family configuration monstrous? The surface answer: because Max is a vampire and a killer. But the deeper answer reveals the show’s ideological limits—it can only imagine family structures that reinforce rather than challenge the primacy of the nuclear family unit.

The show does better with its queer subtext. Sam’s journey from bullied “nervous dweeb” to confident vampire hunter who declares “maybe I can be a hero here and make it cool to be queer” is genuinely moving, and Benjamin Pajak plays it with an earnestness that earns the emotional payoff. The homoerotic tension between David and Michael—coded in the guitar lesson’s “don’t look at the strings, look at me” intimacy and David’s possessive “you belong to me”—gives the vampire seduction real erotic charge.

The show also sharply critiques Reagan-era patriarchal ideology. Max’s pronouncement that “boys need chains” and his belief that the country is “failing its young men” who need “structure and discipline” codes him as the true monster long before his fangs come out. Paul Alexander Nolan plays Max’s authoritarian paternalism with just enough charm to make his villainy feel insidious rather than cartoonish. Yet here again the show can’t fully commit—it wants to reject toxic masculinity but can’t imagine Michael’s salvation outside of becoming “the man of the house” for his mother and brother.

The musical asks enduring questions: Who gets to define what family means? What’s the difference between belonging and being controlled? When does protection become possession? The Rescues’ score and Hornsby and Hoch’s book raise these questions with sophistication, but the answers the show provides reveal its inability to imagine truly radical alternatives to the structures it critiques.

“The Lost Boys” succeeds as theatrical spectacle—Michael Arden’s direction is assured, the design elements are impressive, and several performances (particularly Bourzgui’s dangerous David and Pajak’s earnest Sam) deserve recognition. The Rescues’ score has genuine emotional power in its best moments. But the musical stumbles over its own ideology, unable to reconcile its celebration of chosen family with its insistence that only certain families—those centered on maternal bonds—deserve salvation. The show asks important questions about belonging, control, and who gets to define family, but its answers reveal a failure of imagination. Fans of the original film and those drawn to dark musical theater will find much to appreciate in the craft on display. Yet I left the Palace Theatre troubled by what the show refuses to see: that David’s lost boys, outcasts who found each other in the margins, were a chosen family too—and they deserved better than stakes and holy water.