I have largely avoided engaging with The Lost Boys until now. This has not been the result of any considered judgement about the musical itself. I have not seen the Broadway production, nor have I heard enough of The Rescues’ Tony Award-nominated score to make any definitive assessment of it. I just felt that Broadway’s latest screen-to-stage adaptation could wait for me until the initial noise surrounding it had died down.

On a whim this morning, however, I listened to the four songs released from its forthcoming original Broadway cast recording: “Now, Forever”, “Secret Comes Out”, “Wild” and “Superpower”. With the complete album scheduled for release by Atlantic Records on 24 July, it seemed like a good time to take a first bite, so to speak, of the score.

The four advance tracks from The Lost Boys are perfectly decent. None floored me, but all were better than I had expected them to be.

The Rescues have said they attempted to weave together three tones in the score: ‘heart, humor, and horror’. They associate the horror with vampire numbers such as “Secret”, the humour with Sam and the Frog Brothers, and the heart with songs that explore the characters’ isolation, relationships and attempts to recover lost parts of themselves. Together, they offer a partial glimpse of that range.

“Now, Forever” and “Secret Comes Out” are catchy and accomplished, but neither made an especially strong impression on me as an attempt at storytelling. They seem designed to generate energy and establish atmosphere and may prove far more effective when heard in sequence or seen within Michael Arden’s reportedly spectacular production. On the other hand, “Wild” and “Superpower” felt more substantial.

“Wild” gives Lucy space to consider the person she once was and whether that freedom can be reclaimed. It is recognisably an empowerment anthem, but the adult perspective lends it a degree of dramatic texture. Shoshana Bean’s performance also helps it rise above the familiarity of its construction. Even without having seen the show, I could understand why the song exists and what it offers the character.

Taken together, these tracks place The Lost Boys firmly within what I think of as the Pasek and Paul strand of contemporary musical-theatre writing. Its closest relative is the pop idiom of their later work, particularly The Greatest Showman, rather than their more theatrically specific writing for the stage.

The echoes of another recent Broadway hit, The Outsiders, are also clear. Both shows employ composing teams that came to musical theatre from outside its established writing tradition. This can produce an appealing kind of show tune – melodic, emotionally direct and readily compatible with contemporary popular playlists – but it can also result in songs that do not always appear to know how to function in a larger narrative.

These numbers tend to be effective at identifying a broadly relatable emotional state, like feeling lost, wanting freedom or searching for belonging, and then expanding it into a self-contained anthem. They are built around accessible declarations rather than the accumulation of highly specific dramatic thought. A character enters the song carrying a feeling, names it with increasing force and emerges with that feeling reframed.

That is not inherently bad musical-theatre writing. A song can be both dramatically useful and independently enjoyable. Indeed, the broad accessibility of this style of musical theatre can be one of its strengths. But when every complicated experience is shaped into the same kind of emotional pattern, character and context can begin to blur. The song tells us something recognisable without telling us enough about a particular character at a specific moment in time.

Some of the gaps may be filled when the complete recording is released. Songs taken out of sequence often sound more generic than they are when surrounded by scenes, reprises and musical motifs. For that reason, I’m cautious about making too sweeping a judgement on the evidence of four tracks.

That said, “Superpower” raises a question that goes beyond whether the song will eventually make more sense in context.

The first thing I clocked was its use of the word ‘queer’. It locates the song within a particular vocabulary of identity and self-recognition. Whatever other meanings the number may accommodate, it does not seem to evoke queerness accidentally. Its central metaphor – in which the quality that leaves Sam isolated and ashamed becomes the source of his power – is inseparable from the structure of a coming-out anthem.

Arden has himself described Sam as queer. Speaking to Vogue, he called the character a ‘younger, queer-coded little brother’ and later said that Sam, in his mind, is queer. But he also insisted that this is not a story about a gay teenager. Instead, he presented Sam’s experience as one that could apply to anyone who has felt different or ashamed of their unique abilities.

Personally, I found that equivocation disappointing.

The problem is not that “Superpower” might resonate with people beyond a specifically queer experience. Of course it can. Highly particular stories frequently generate the most universal responses. A song does not become less accessible because the experience at its centre is clearly named. In drama, universality generally emerges from specificity rather than from watering down an idea into something generic.

If “Superpower” is intended simply to function as an anthem for anyone who has ever felt that they did not belong, then there is something tone-deaf about borrowing so explicitly from queer language while declining to commit to queer meaning. At a time when people’s rights to express their gender and sexuality are under sustained pressure, this kind of sidestepping doesn’t feel neutral. It risks commodifying the emotional force and imagery of queer self-affirmation while protecting its broader marketability through plausible deniability about what is actually happening.

Ambiguity can be productive. Sam does not necessarily need to announce a fixed label or define himself in language beyond his understanding. There is also a meaningful distinction between allowing a young character to remain complex and forcing him into a neat representational category, but this is not quite the same as refusing to name what a work has deliberately signalled. Given the song’s wording, Arden’s description of Sam and the trajectory from shame to pride, stepping away from a queer interpretation when directly asked about it feels less like preserving ambiguity than hedging the production’s bets.

Perhaps the complete score and the production itself present Sam with greater clarity and depth. Perhaps “Superpower” functions differently when experienced as part of his relationships with Michael and Lucy rather than as a standalone track. I remain open to having these first impressions complicated.

The songs from The Lost Boys have left me more interested than I expected to be. “Wild” and “Superpower” suggest that there may be more substance in the score than its pop surface initially reveals. They also expose the central challenge faced by this strand of contemporary musical theatre: how to turn an immediately accessible song into a dramatically specific act of storytelling.

There will be time for another bite once the full recording arrives; I’ve already pre-saved it on Spotify. For now, though, “Superpower” has given us something worth chewing over.