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Vampire musicals are having a moment. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is dominating Oscars buzz with 16 nominations. In June, AMC will release a spin-off of Interview with the Vampire where the opera-loving vampire Lestat (Sam Reid) starts a band and goes on tour to change his image. And previews begin March 27 for The Lost Boys, a Broadway musical adaptation of Joel Schumacher’s 1987 cult horror-comedy. The show’s writers, David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, tells Polygon in a video interview that they’re trying to learn from previous successes and failures in the genre while delivering plenty of spectacle.
“Every musical needs to have really big themes and big wants, and there is just something really great to sink your teeth into about vampire stories as metaphors,” Hornsby says. “That’s the kind of stuff you want to sing about.”
Schumacher’s The Lost Boys follows teenagers Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam Emerson (Corey Haim) as they move with their recently divorced mom, Lucy (Dianne Wiest), to the seaside town of Santa Clara, California. Michael falls under the influence of David (Kiefer Sutherland), the leader of a gang of vampires. Sam teams up with the comic-book-obsessed Frog brothers (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) to try to stop his brother from turning into a creature of the night. The film is campy, homoerotic, and extremely influential, laying the groundwork for later vampire series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and What We Do in the Shadows.
“[The film has] a really unique sense of humor mixed with the drama of being a teenager, so we wanted to try to capture that tone on stage,” Hornsby says.
Hoch was actually part of the original cast of the 2004 Broadway production Dracula, the Musical, which closed after less than a year. The first act of Don Black and Christopher Hampton’s show ends with Hoch’s character staking his wife, who has become a vampire, and blood spurting from her body. It was meant to be a serious, emotional scene, but audiences laughed so hard, Hoch thought they were responding to something else, that perhaps he’d split his pants.
“It’s difficult to take an audience through a genre like that,” Hoch says. “There are times [in The Lost Boys] that we really want the audience to feel something, and there are beautiful moments of belonging and a coming-of-age story that we are trying to set up in a way that protects it from being not taken seriously because of the genre.”
Hornsby and Hoch say they’re dealing with that issue by leaning into the movie’s teenage boy humor, so the audience has relief-valve laugh moments. But the show is primarily focused on drama, big emotions, and Broadway spectacle. Tony-winning director Michael Arden and his regular collaborator scenic designer Dane Laffrey are embracing the special effects-driven moments from the movie like vampires flying around and gory vampire deaths.
“This is a massive musical,” Hornsby says. “There were only a certain number of theaters we could perform in, because of the size of it.”
The writers combed through Schumacher’s film to decide what iconic moments they had to keep and what they could cut. The Emersons’ eccentric grandfather (Barnard Hughes in the movie version) doesn’t appear in the play: Instead, the family inherits his home. Hornsby says he’s constantly asked, “Is the oiled-up sax guy going to be there?” but he wouldn’t confirm whether they’d have someone replicating Tim Cappello’s movie performance of “I Still Believe” on stage. Lucy will get her own song about trying to recapture her wild flower-child years, and Star (Jami Gertz in the movie), the one female vampire in David’s band, will have more time in the spotlight.
“Star, I think we needed to bring up the most, but also David,” Hornsby says. “You don’t want him to just be some archvillain. Kiefer made such a meal out of so little in the movie. Weirdly, there’s not a lot of David lines, but he has such charisma. So we have to ask ‘What does this guy sing about?’ You have to dig deep there.”
Hoch and Hornsby wouldn’t reveal how their musical will build on the film’s status as a queer cinema touchstone, but they’ll be leaning into its themes of found family and outsiders connecting amid the conservatism of the Reagan era.
“Every generation feels [that] their history lines up with vampire tales,” Hoch says. “What Sinners did so well was morph Coogler’s thoughts about Jim Crow into vampires. They’re a great metaphor, so I think that’s why they’re coming back. They’re incredibly sexy, dangerous, and fun.”
