By: Sir Michael Fomkin
I’ve spent twenty years in this industry watching talent walk through doors. I’ve sat in casting rooms, watched performers take their first steps on stage, and built careers from the ground up with people who didn’t yet know what they were capable of. So when I tell you that The Lost Boys: A New Musical is the most electrifying night I’ve spent in a Broadway house in a very long time, I say that with the full weight of two decades behind it.
This show is not just a musical. It is a masterclass in what happens when every single element of a production — the story, the design, the direction, the performances — fires at the same time. And on this particular night at the Palace Theatre, that’s exactly what happened.
Why I Went In Skeptical (And Why That Matters)
Let me be honest with you. When I heard they were turning the 1987 Warner Bros. vampire film into a Broadway musical, I raised an eyebrow. The industry is littered with adaptations that mistake nostalgia for substance. The original film is a cult classic — Kiefer Sutherland, Santa Carla, California, teenage vampires with leather jackets and a killer soundtrack. It holds a place in the hearts of an entire generation. Including mine.
So the bar was high. Not just to honor the source material, but to justify its existence on the Broadway stage. You don’t bring something to the Palace Theatre and ask audiences to pay that kind of money without having something real to say.
This production has something real to say. Several things, actually.
The Story and What It’s Really About
For those unfamiliar with the original, the setup is this: a divorced mother named Lucy uproots her two teenage sons, Michael and Sam, and moves them to the sun-drenched coastal town of Santa Carla, California, desperate for a fresh start. What they find instead is darkness — specifically, a gang of teenage vampires led by the charismatic and terrifying David. Michael is drawn in. Sam sees the truth. And Lucy is left trying to hold a fractured family together while the night closes in.
On the surface, it’s a horror story. But what the creative team — book writers David Hornsby and Chris Hoch, with music and lyrics by the band The Rescues — has done is build something underneath that surface that hits with genuine emotional force. This is a story about belonging. About the desperate human need to find a place where you are accepted. About the difference between a family that loves you and a family that traps you. About the way trauma can turn you into either a survivor or a predator.
I’ve spent twenty years working with actors and models who walk into my world looking for exactly that — a place they belong. A community that sees them. An ecosystem that helps them become something. That’s what VIP Ignite has always been. And that’s what The Lost Boys the musical understands in a way the film only hinted at.
The Tony Wins and What They Tell You
At the 79th Annual Tony Awards, held June 7, 2026, at Radio City Music Hall, The Lost Boys arrived with twelve nominations — tied for the most of any production in the 2025–2026 season — and left with four wins. Four Tonys. Best Featured Actor in a Musical. Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Best Scenic Design of a Musical. Best Lighting Design of a Musical.
That sweep should tell you something. Because those four categories cover the full spectrum of what makes live theater live. The performances tell you the human element landed. The scenic and lighting design tell you the world of the show was built at the highest level. When a production wins both the human and the structural, it’s not luck. It’s execution.
Dane Laffrey’s multilevel scenic design is something I genuinely did not expect to witness. The Palace Theatre has been transformed into something that blurs the boundary between film set and stage. You believe you are in Santa Carla. You believe that this town has a dark side the sun cannot reach. And when the vampires take to the air — and they do take to the air — the staging creates a physical sensation in the house that you don’t get from a screen. That’s the power of live performance. That’s the thing no streaming platform can replicate. Jen Schriever’s lighting sculpts every scene with the precision of a cinematographer and the boldness of a rock concert. Together, their work is genuinely breathtaking.
Ali Louis Bourzgui Is the Star This Show Deserved
Now let’s talk about the performance that will define this production for years to come.
Ali Louis Bourzgui plays David, the vampire leader — the role made iconic on film by a young Kiefer Sutherland. That is not a small shadow to step out of. And Bourzgui does not step out of it. He steps past it.
At just 26 years old, Bourzgui is a Moroccan-American actor who began his theatrical journey in the Berkshires of Massachusetts — performing on community stages, finding his footing at places like Berkshire Theatre Group and Barrington Stage Company before studying musical theater in college. After graduating in 2021, he joined the national tour of The Band’s Visit, then Company, before making his Broadway debut in the 2024 revival of The Who’s Tommy. From there, he moved into an off-Broadway production called We Live in Cairo and spent the summer of 2025 as Orpheus in Hadestown. A résumé built brick by brick, role by role. That’s not luck. That’s the infrastructure of a career.
What he brings to David is something I haven’t seen on a Broadway stage in a very long time: a villain you understand while you fear him. Bourzgui plays David not as a monster, but as a broken person who chose to stop feeling in order to stop hurting — and in doing so, became monstrous. He seduces Michael into his orbit not through brute force but through the offering of exactly what Michael craves: acceptance, belonging, power, a family. David is selling the same thing cult leaders sell. The same thing bad management companies sell. The same thing every predatory system sells to young people who haven’t yet learned to read the fine print.
I notice those things. It’s my job to notice them. And the fact that Bourzgui’s performance communicates all of that while he’s flying above the stage in a blond mullet, selling pop-rock anthems to a sold-out house, is a level of craft that deserves every syllable of his Tony Award win for Best Featured Actor in a Musical.
He told interviewers during the run that David represents anyone who tries to steal your spark or your individualism. That David is a warning about what happens when you find a chosen family that accepts you on the condition that you become what it needs — not who you are. As someone who has built a talent development organization on the exact opposite philosophy, I feel that in my bones.
Shoshana Bean Carries the Heart of This Show
The other featured Tony winner is Shoshana Bean, who plays Lucy — the mother holding this family together by will and love alone. Bean is a Grammy-winning, multi-Tony-nominated force of nature, and her performance here is the emotional anchor that gives all the spectacle somewhere to land. When everything else is chaos and darkness and aerial stunts, Lucy’s story brings you back to what matters. Bean sings with the kind of full-body commitment that reminds you what a live voice in a live room can actually do. Her Tony win was not a surprise. It was an inevitability.
Michael Arden’s Direction Is Cinema on a Stage
Director Michael Arden, a two-time Tony winner himself, has created something that genuinely earns the word “blockbuster.” The show does not feel like a film adaptation that has been reduced to fit a stage. It feels like a piece that has been reimagined for the theater — for the specific, irreplaceable experience of a thousand people in the same room watching the same story unfold in real time.
The pop-rock score by The Rescues pulses with a coastal California energy that made me feel twenty years younger. The choreography by Lauren Yalango-Grant and Christopher Cree Grant is kinetic and ferocious in the best possible way. And the casting — from LJ Benet as Michael to Paul Alexander Nolan as the chilling Max — is airtight from top to bottom.
Why This Show Matters Beyond the Stage
I take talent to events. I build talent in rooms. I put performers in front of industry. And one thing I tell every person who sits across from me is this: study what mastery looks like. Wherever you find it. At every level.
The Lost Boys on Broadway is mastery. It is the product of a creative team that understood what they had, respected the audience enough to deliver it fully, and refused to cut corners anywhere it counted. Twelve Tony nominations and four wins is the industry’s way of agreeing.
If you have the opportunity to be in New York and get yourself to the Palace Theatre, you go. You sit in that house. You watch what happens when performance, design, writing, and direction all reach the same level at the same time. That’s not common. And in an industry where I have spent twenty years training people to be ready for exactly those moments — I can tell you that what’s happening at the Palace Theatre right now is worth every minute you spend getting there.
Five stars. No hesitation.
Sir Michael Fomkin is the co-founder of VIP Ignite and Power Penguin Productions LLC, a talent development organization with a 20-year track record of connecting actors, models, and influencers with real industry opportunities.
