To prepare you for this critique, Arden starts the show inside a derelict ironworks \u2014 who murdered American manufacturing? \u2014 with a TV playing a Ronald Reagan speech on family values. By the television\u2019s flickering glow, we see, or think we see, the first kill of the night. Bare glimmers of sidelight by the designers Jen Schriever and Arden leave much of it to our imagination, though we definitely perceive something touching down, light as a dancer, right before the screams begin. I watched this first scene with my hand pressed to my mouth, as if I were swooning in a Bram Stoker novel. If I hadn\u2019t made it, my last words would have been, faintly, set design \u2026<\/p>\n
Because, my children, tonight the design freaks feast. \u201cThe Lost Boys\u201d contains the finest spectacle I\u2019ve seen this season outside of the Met Opera: Laffrey\u2019s set consists of a three-tiered brick arcade, a series of arched passageways leading back into shadow, full of cunning secrets \u2014 an ornate old elevator, a jillion sliding staircases, a two-story house. There are as many ways to fall into it as to rise, weightlessly, on wires above it. The Palace is a huge Broadway stage, yet Arden and his team make us aware of how much more space is surrounding it that we cannot see. It\u2019s a bit like that moment in the ocean when you realize, oh, there are miles of water down there.<\/p>\n
In the second half, though, even these keen delights pall. The pit elevators go up and down a few too many times; the ensemble, so cleverly employed in the beach-concert scenes, become superfluous and turn up as generalized chorus dancers, when the show hasn\u2019t needed such things before. And the ending \u2026 well, anyway. I therefore prefer to remember the Lost Boys when the show hasn\u2019t yet grown old. For instance, right now, I\u2019m thinking of the moment when Michael steps backward into a cloud in midair \u2014 an image, for me, of breathtaking beauty. Isn\u2019t that enough? Surely no pleasure is meant to live forever.<\/p>\n