The Lost Boys, and by that I mean the musical adaptation which opened tonight on Broadway at the Palace Theatre, starts with a bang. If anything, the show lives up to that adrenaline rush by delivering jaw-dropping sets and special effects, jump scares, and a funhouse of surprises for fans of the movie and newcomers alike. But does it all add up?

Based on Joel Schumacher’s 1987 cult classic of the same name, Michael Arden and team have cleverly massaged the original’s plot to translate it to the stage. The Emerson family are still the center of the story as we find them in transition from Phoenix, AZ to the seedy beach town of Santa Carla in California.

Lucy (Shoshana Bean) has taken her two sons, the brooding Michael (LJ Benet) and Sam (Benjamin Pajak), who has “an eye for footwear” and decor aesthetics, out of an abusive home and back to her hometown and the house her father left her when he died.

With scars both literal and figurative from his past, Michael is disaffected and displaced, with an ache to be a part of a family that’s whole and doesn’t require survival. That’s when he finds David (Ali Louis Bourzgui), his misfit brothers, and more importantly, he finds Star (Maria Wirries), the mysterious girl he’s inexorably drawn to.

On the other side of the boardwalk, Lucy, a former hippie nostalgic for the Summer of Love, finds a job at a video store and a surprising spark with its conservative, Barry Goldwater-admiring owner Max (Paul Alexander Nolan). The comic book-obsessed Sam meets Edgar and Alan Frog (Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka, respectively), a bumbling duo of sibling vigilantes who clue Sam in on Santa Carla’s biggest secret: it’s overrun with vampires. Or, so they believe. 

Arden and the team’s smartest decision was to turn David and The Lost Boys into a punk rock band. (The book is by David Hornsby & Chris Hoch, music and lyrics by the Los Angeles-based band The Rescues.)  The music’s power of seduction perfectly mirrors David’s own powers to sway and coerce. If anything, it provides the perfect excuse to amp up their iconic hardcore, steampunk aesthetic from the movie. (Costume design by Ryan Park; hair & wig design by David Brian Brown.) 

While the book writers have gone at great length to expand the backstory of several characters, including David, the apparent leader of these undead punk rockers, which is particularly effective, the rest of the Lost Boys: Marko (Brian Flores), Dwayne (Sean Grandillo), and Paul (Dean Maupin) are stuck in thinly sketched, sidekick mode. Mercifully, they’ve given Star more to do and say than the movie provides her with and Bean, a Broadway veteran with a formidable presence on stage and a voice that fills the house, takes on the complicated layers of a mother losing her grip on an adolescent son while trying to forge her own life.

The musical channels the 80s maximalism of the movie in Dane Laffrey’s elaborate, towering sets and Jen Schriever’s gorgeous, cinematic lighting design. (Arden also gets credit for lighting.) Just when you think there isn’t room for another location, another one rolls in. This production has to have the record for most motorcycles on stage. Those elements, along with Markus Maurette’s special effects, could be considered worth the price of admission.

Where this grand spectacle starts to unravel is in the music. The Rescues’ cliche-ridden lyrics fail to interestingly explore the emotions of the characters while only intermittently moving the plot along. There are a few standouts among a parade of songs I can’t remember. 

Bourzgui is both scary and sexy as David. He amps up the homoerotic undertones of his relationship with Michael. His performance may live in the shadow of Kiefer Sutherland’s from the movie, but Bourzgui makes strides to make it his own nonetheless. Miguel Gil and Jennifer Duka fail to totally capture the particular lovable dopiness of the Frog brothers, though they are both game and charming and welcome comic relief. 

Vampire stories are about the changing body and the alienation that comes with it. Arden also makes sure we remember we are in the era of Reagan, when the heterosexual, nuclear family was upheld as the paragon of virtue and honor, a bulwark against the degenerate and unseemly. Anything that fell below that standard was vulnerable to attack. Arden’s expert direction signals at these themes, yet the book boils it down to trite messaging. 

We’re left reminded that families come in all shapes and sizes. They can be formed around circumstances other than genetics and blood. 

Well, in this case, blood might have something to do with it, too. 

The Lost Boys is now in performance at the Palace Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

Is August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone a hangout play? 

In its conception, perhaps not. Written in 1984 as the second installment in Wilson’s celebrated “Pittsburgh Cycle,” Joe Turner delicately unfolds the backstories of several troubled residents at a Pittsburgh boarding house in 1911. 

Contemplative in tone, it is certainly one of Wilson’s quieter works. Yet the play probably shouldn’t feel like an extended chill-out session, as it frequently does in Debbie Allen’s new Broadway staging. Softness slides into sleepiness in this unremarkable revival, now at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, which never comes to life despite several intriguing performances. 

Under a sharper directorial hand, even Wilson in a softer register can hum with disquieting intensity. Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s superb 2017 revival of Jitney dialed into that frequency expertly and pulsed with energizing life. And while LaTanya Richardson Jackson’s spooky 2022 staging of The Piano Lesson was a tad overwrought, it similarly buzzed with the piquant vigor of Wilson’s evocative dialogue. 

Jackson and team also conjured an otherworldly presence in Piano Lesson, that intangible plane of existence just outside of our own. By contrast, Allen’s staging of Joe Turner is earthbound to a fault, floating by with an easy-breezy energy that often baffles. 

The issue is most pronounced around our ostensible leads, patriarch Seth Holly (Cedric the Entertainer) and his wife Bertha (Taraji P. Henson), who together manage the boarding house. The Hollys are the most stable and grounded figures in this story, having found mutual comfort and shared purpose. But here, Seth and Bertha too often feel like background players, only vaguely concerned with the various dramas passing through their home. Mr. Entertainer is playing it chillaxed; and while Henson is stronger, her rousing delivery of Bertha’s moving late monologue about life’s purpose (“All you need is to have love in one hand, and laughter in the other”) feels like the first and only time Bertha is allowed to own the space.

Among the passers-through in the Holly home, a strong array of performers find various degrees of success. It is the grounded, intimate side stories that find a place easier in Allen’s production. So the play’s two young women stand out the most: sweetly Mattie Campbell and self-sufficient Molly Cunningham. A heartbreakingly gentle Nimime Sierra Wureh is excellent as Mattie, while a sharp-edged Maya Boyd steals a few scenes as Molly. Both enjoy a sharp repartee with quick-tongued womanizer Jeremy Furlow, likably portrayed by Tripp Taylor. 

The men of this story carry burdens of a more spiritual nature, and these actors have a harder time in a staging that does not look to conjure ghosts. The invaluable Santiago-Hudson, as local hoodoo practitioner Bynum Walker, is a seasoned interpreter of Wilson’s work, and delivers Bynum’s winding monologues with natural ease. Yet excellent as he is, Santiago-Hudson feels like he’s in a different production all of his own. 

So too does Joshua Boone as the mysterious and often menacing Harold Loomis, the beating heart of Wilson’s play. Traumatized by seven years of  forced labor under the hand of white “mancatcher” Joe Turner, Loomis is seeking absolution and a new place in the world. Boone is terrific in the role, fiery and brutishly intense. His Loomis is a genuinely frightening figure—Boone does not shy away from the character’s instability, even as Loomis’ essential goodness always remains palpable. 

But as with Walker, this production lets down the character of Loomis a bit by neglecting the play’s deep connections to that other plane of existence. Both characters look to find “their song,” a path that leads them to shared visions of, “Bones rising up out of the water” and then swept violently to shore. 

Allen and her designers only engage visually with these apparitions when the text absolutely forces it. The lighting, by Stacey Derosier, is resolutely naturalistic except at each act’s conclusion, when it goes haywire a bit too abruptly. David Gallo’s set has nothing non-literal to offer, attractive as it is. Allen instead leans heavily on musical underscoring by Steve Bargonetti—but this mostly creeps in to heavy-handily underline or highlight dramatic moments. 

For all its issues, this Joe Turner still packs a punch once that final scene arrives. Effective buildup or no, Wilson was a master at a shattering conclusion. 

‍Joe Turner’s Come and Gone is now in performance at the Barrymore Theatre on West 47th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.

The producers of BLOOD/LOVE, the original vampire pop opera, have announced the release of the show’s debut EP, arriving today all streaming platforms April 24 via Joy Machine Records. This collection of dark genre-blending pop rock and theatrical storytelling translates the immersive world into a cinematic listening experience. Click here to stream and see the exclusive music video of “Dress To Kill” below. 

When discussing the upcoming release, Dru DeCaro said “Blood/Love represents the spoils of many late-night-into-early-morning contests. These songs show our tastes-- They are stylish and messy and stretch across genre and era, much as vampires do. This EP and this story are for the goths and the theater kids and the forever young, all the outcasts, the out-of-body, and all the in between.”

Written by Carey Renee Sharpe and Dru DeCaro and produced by 115 Productions, the forthcoming EP will include 7 tracks including fan favorites and previously released singles including:

·“Last Drop” a mainstage club anthem that, like the best mainstage club anthems, could literally play forever on repeat.

·“2 Feet in the Grave” a pure grade rock & roll & fear & loathing that forever alters Valerie’s perception of the world she knew.

·“Dress To Kill” is a moment of letting loose that resulted in something both fun and intentionally dark. It’s high-energy but definitely laced with something more sinister.

·“PrettyBoy” is the culmination of two songs stitched into one another, not unlike Mary Shelley's creature and at least as volatile.

·“Covenant I” is one of several recurring themes in BLOOD/LOVE, and serves as a siren song, an invitation that, upon hearing, confirms without question the listener is in diabolical clutches.

·“Prey,” another major theme and the first song we wrote back in 2020, which revealed the rest of the show to us like a haunted Ouija board.

·“The Burden,” a power ballad that reaches the highest highs and the lowest lows and it's the kind of song best suited for a wedding or a funeral or a dive bar or a stadium.

To celebrate the release, showgoers on Saturday, April 25th at 9 PM are invited to join for a special pop-up afterparty presented by Mood Ring, one of Bushwick’s finest music venues. The party will offer a sneak peek of the upcoming EP and feature performances by Black Cherry Sideshow, Ruby Moonrouge, with sets by Lady Harley and Statice. After-party admission is included with a regular ticket purchase for that night. For more information visit https://bloodlove.com/