To prepare you for this critique, Arden starts the show inside a derelict ironworks — who murdered American manufacturing? — with a TV playing a Ronald Reagan speech on family values. By the television’s flickering glow, we see, or think we see, the first kill of the night. Bare glimmers of sidelight by the designers Jen Schriever and Arden leave much of it to our imagination, though we definitely perceive something touching down, light as a dancer, right before the screams begin. I watched this first scene with my hand pressed to my mouth, as if I were swooning in a Bram Stoker novel. If I hadn’t made it, my last words would have been, faintly, set design …
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.
In the second half, though, even these keen delights pall. The pit elevators go up and down a few too many times; the ensemble, so cleverly employed in the beach-concert scenes, become superfluous and turn up as generalized chorus dancers, when the show hasn’t needed such things before. And the ending … well, anyway. I therefore prefer to remember the Lost Boys when the show hasn’t yet grown old. For instance, right now, I’m thinking of the moment when Michael steps backward into a cloud in midair — an image, for me, of breathtaking beauty. Isn’t that enough? Surely no pleasure is meant to live forever.
The Lost Boys
At the Palace Theater, Manhattan; lostboysmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/26/theater/the-lost-boys-review.html
