https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/broadway-review-the-lost-boys-a-musical-that-goes-for-blood-042726
"Director Michael Arden and scenic designer Dane Laffrey, whose past collaborations include Maybe Happy Ending and A Christmas Carol, have again created a world we’ve never seen onstage before: surprising, thrilling, sometimes genuinely unsettling. The good things about The Lost Boys are so good, in fact, that they make its fumbles especially frustrating; there’s a sense of lost opportunity. But to an impressive extent, the show succeeds where earlier vampire-themed musicals—the ironically short-lived Dance of the Vampires, Dracula and Lestat—have merely sucked. ""
But here’s the catch: By elevating its material so consistently in the first act, The Lost Boys makes its subsequent change of tone all the more jarring. To some extent, this could be expected: A similar thing happens in the film, which was conceived as a Goonies-style tween-adventure comedy and reverted to that style more and more as it went along (before ending in geysers of gore). In Act Two, the musical moves its focus to its younger characters: Sam and his fellow comic-book nerds, the Frog Brothers (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka), who have previously served as comic relief. In the film, Sam is gay-coded; the musical pulls an Alan Turing on that code, turning him overtly gay. That’s fine, except it triggers a regrettable shift into the kind of camp that The Lost Boys has otherwise smartly avoided. In a nod to his interest in comics, the show gives Sam two numbers that are deliberately cartoonish: one featuring corny old vampire stereotypes in capes and slicked-back hair, the other with corny old superheroes and, I’m afraid, an even cornier new message: “Maybe I can be a hero here / And make it cool to be queer / Maybe that’s my superpower.”
"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. This may be a function of the fact that the musical is premiering directly on Broadway, without prior out-of-town runs; with more development time, the creators might have devised a second half equal to the first. Instead, just when they seem poised to tap into the heart of the vampire musical, they back off and lower the stakes. "
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