A vampire musical has finally landed on Broadway without sinking. The Lost Boys: A New Musical opened Sunday night, April 26, 2026, at the Palace Theatre, capping the 2025–26 Broadway season with a world premiere that arrives carrying both Tony Award expectations and the weight of three decades of failed undead-themed predecessors. The stage adaptation of Joel Schumacher’s 1987 cult-classic film stars Shoshana Bean, Ali Louis Bourzgui, Benjamin Pajak, and LJ Benet, with direction from two-time Tony winner Michael Arden and a score by indie band The Rescues.
The production lands at the Palace as the season’s final new musical opening, a strategic placement that puts it directly in the path of Tony nomination voters ahead of the May 5 announcement.
The Creative Team Behind the Production
Michael Arden, who won back-to-back Tony Awards for Parade and last season’s Maybe Happy Ending, directs a production that uses the full vertical depth of the Palace Theatre stage. Dane Laffrey’s set extends three stories into the fly space and includes a functioning elevator and a sunken playing level, allowing Arden’s staging to operate on multiple planes simultaneously. Aerial choreography by Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant sends the cast soaring above the audience, with one ensemble flight sequence drawing comparison to the more theatrical moments of Stranger Things: The First Shadow.
The book is by David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, both new to Broadway musicals, working from the original story by Janice Fischer and James Jeremias. Music and lyrics come from The Rescues, the indie trio of Kyler England, AG, and Gabriel Mann, with music supervision and orchestrations by two-time Tony nominee Ethan Popp. The production reportedly cost $25 million to mount, more than three times the original film’s budget, and lists more than 50 producers and co-producing entities, including Warner Bros. Theatre Ventures and original Lost Boys star Kiefer Sutherland.
The Cast
Shoshana Bean leads the company as Lucy Emerson, the marriage-weary mother who relocates her two sons from Phoenix to the fictional California beach town of Santa Carla. The two-time Tony nominee anchors the show’s emotional arc with a power ballad titled “Wild,” one of several Rescues compositions designed to showcase the principals’ vocal range.
LJ Benet plays Michael, the older Emerson son drawn into the orbit of a charismatic local rock band, while Benjamin Pajak plays younger brother Sam, whose proto-queer storyline from the film has been elevated from subtext to text. Ali Louis Bourzgui, last seen leading The Who’s Tommy on Broadway, plays David, the leader of the vampire gang, with Maria Wirries as Star, Paul Alexander Nolan as Max, and Jennifer Duka and Miguel Gil as the Frog brothers. The supporting ensemble includes Brian Flores, Sean Grandillo, and Dean Maupin.
The Story on Stage
The musical retains the essential plot of the 1987 film. Lucy Emerson moves with her sons Michael and Sam to Santa Carla after leaving an abusive marriage. Michael falls in with a local rock band whose members turn out to be vampires, and Sam, with help from teenage vampire hunters Edgar and Alan Frog, has to figure out how to save his brother before the transformation becomes permanent.
The book makes one significant change from the screen version, eliminating the not-so-clueless grandfather played in the film by Barnard Hughes. His absence reassigns the movie’s well-known final line to a different character. Arden and the writers compensate with a brief post-curtain-call coda that has been drawing audiences to stay through the house lights.
Critical Reception
The reviews that landed Sunday night and Monday morning split along familiar Broadway lines. Deadline‘s Greg Evans described the show as breaking the long-running curse of vampire musicals on Broadway, which has previously claimed Dracula the Musical, Lestat, and Dance of the Vampires. TheaterMania‘s Pete Hempstead called it the best new musical on Broadway. Entertainment Weekly and Vulture landed in positive territory, with both noting the production’s blend of horror, humor, and aerial spectacle.
The dissenters pushed back on tone and pacing. The Wrap‘s Robert Hofler questioned whether the show knew if it wanted to be a horror piece, a tearjerker, or a parody. Cititour‘s Brian Scott Lipton praised the cast and score but argued the production needed less spectacle, not more. Frank Scheck writing for New York Stage Review compared the experience to a theme park attraction.
Tony Award Positioning
The opening lands roughly a week before Tony nominations are announced on May 5, 2026, and the show enters that window with momentum. The Lost Boys picked up 11 Outer Critics Circle nominations earlier in the week, the most of any production this season. Industry observers have placed it in the Best Musical conversation alongside Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), with Schmigadoon! and Titanique also in the mix as late-season contenders.
Arden’s track record adds weight to the technical and direction categories. The director’s work on Maybe Happy Ending and Parade has positioned him as a perennial nominee, and the design team behind The Lost Boys — including Laffrey on set, Jen Schriever on lighting, and the aerial team — gives the production a strong case in the design races regardless of how the top categories shake out.
What Comes Next
Tickets are on sale through November 21, 2026, with prices ranging from $55 to $270. Running time clocks in at roughly two hours and 40 minutes, including one intermission. Capacity numbers from the first preview week have placed the show among the strongest new musicals on the Broadway grosses chart, and the producers will be watching the post-Tony window closely to gauge whether the spectacle pulls in the Stranger Things–style audience that has carried genre productions in recent seasons.
For now, the Palace Theatre has its biggest new tenant of the season, Broadway has a vampire musical that critics are willing to take seriously, and the 2026 Tony race has its final major variable in place.
