How 'The Lost Boys' vampire film sings on Broadway

A supernatural story with deeply human themes — and the addition of an onstage rock band — made the cult-classic '80s movie ripe for the musical treatment.

Summary

• The Lost Boys musical is adapted from the 1987 film about a family's battle against vampires in their new town
• The score by indie band The Rescues is influenced by '80s rock
• The musical turns the vampires into an onstage rock band called The Lost Boys
• The show's supernatural storyline and human themes of family; identity; and belonging all make the story sing

Nearly 40 years after its big-screen release, The Lost Boys — the cult-classic horror-comedy film about a family tangling with a town full of vampires — is rising again, this time as a Broadway musical.

Created by book writers David Hornsby and Chris Hoch with songs by indie band The Rescues, the show flies onto the stage on March 27. As the cast and creative team prepare to bare their heart, soul, and fangs at the Palace Theatre, New York Theatre Guide asked them to sink their teeth into one question: What makes a vampire story like The Lost Boys sing?

The songs soar to supernatural heights

“They say musicals should touch the heavens,” said Hornsby, a Broadway newcomer known for playing a defrocked priest on the TV series It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. “They have to be big enough and epic enough.”

The Lost Boys has the requisite thrust. After divorced mom Lucy Emerson (Tony Award nominee Shoshana Bean) and her teenage sons, Sam (Benjamin Pajak) and Michael (LJ Benet), move to the seaside town of Santa Carla, California, for fresh starts, they’re snared in the fight of their lives against the charismatic yet cold-blooded David (Ali Louis Bourzgui) and his band of young vampires. The plot follows the 1987 film starring Jason Patric, Dianne Wiest, and Kiefer Sutherland.

“[The story] innately sings because these people live in a heightened reality,” said producer Marcus Chait. (He and his producing partners, Patrick Wilson and James Carpinello, are all veteran theatre actors.) “There’s a world that is set up within this story that it’s not so ludicrous that people might break [into song].”

Tony-winning director Michael Arden (Maybe Happy Ending, Parade) got involved in musicalizing The Lost Boys after receiving a call from the producers in 2021. He promptly watched the movie for the first time.

“I love vampire stories, so that was exciting,” he said. “There’s something incredibly musical about that anyway — these big themes of life and death and mortality and why we make the choices we make. We also saw an opportunity to make something really young and energetic and sexy.”

Maria Wirries, who plays half-vampire Star, said The Lost Boys was born to belt. Musical theatre 101 teaches that characters sing when spoken dialogue is no longer sufficient to express the intensity of their emotions.

“Vampires are larger than life, and musicals are larger than life,” said Wirries. “When you can’t speak anymore, you have to sing. That is the magic of musical theatre.”

Human drama drives the music

Amid the vampires, The Lost Boys also sings with deeply human themes, from family bonds and adolescent identity to seductive peer pressure and the dangerous allure of power.

"[These] thematic threads are really what the score hangs on and what the whole story hangs on,” said Bean. “The vampires are really just the catalyst.”

“We’re really trying to make the show about the family at the core of it,” echoed Bourzgui. “They’re a very human family, they have their faults. But they’re there for each other.”

“The vampires,” he added, “are a great tool to look at humanity through a distant lens.”

In fact, Arden came up with the idea to make David and his gang an actual rock band called The Lost Boys, a departure from the movie. This change makes music organic to the story and makes the vampires seem a bit closer to human themselves — at first glance, at least.

How the score comes to life on stage

The plum assignment of creating Santa Carla's sonic world went to The Rescues, a Los Angeles-based pop-rock trio composed of Adrianne Gonzalez (AG), Gabriel Mann, and Kyler England.

The group is known for blending lush harmonies with moody, melancholic lyrics. Three of their songs for The Lost Boys — “Have to Have You,” “Belong to Someone,” and “Wild,” — have already been released in October 2025 on an EP called The Santa Carla Sessions, available to stream.

“We’re drawn to big, anthemic melodies, and we all grew up as choir geeks, so this show is just full of harmony and voices,” said England. “That’s a really big defining feature of this show and of our music.”

Wirries described The Rescues' score as a mix of '80s-inspired bangers and intimate ballads, while Benet summed up The Lost Boys as “a freaking rock concert.” Sounds fan(g)tastic to us.

Get The Lost Boys tickets now.

Gillian Russo contributed reporting to this story.

Photo credit: Ali Louis Bourzgui, LJ Benet, and Maria Wirries for The Lost Boys. (Photos by Matthew Murphy)