Theater in New York has felt spookier than usual this season: Beetlejuice has risen from the afterlife; a bat boy has just arrived to deliver a morality tale; and not one but two phantoms are lurking in the shadows, stalking that poor Christine.
In case anyone was mistaken, Halloween is upon us and, with a “Rocky Horror Show” revival on the horizon, the frights will persist.
And it’s not just for New Yorkers. Through Nov. 3, audiences at home can encounter the menacing title character of “The Phantom of the Opera” via Theater in Quarantine’s livestreamed production. Unlike “Masquerade,” the immersive version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical now running in a former art supply shop, this one is being broadcast from a 2-foot-by-4-foot-by-8-foot closet in Joshua William Gelb’s East Village apartment.
“We wanted to see if we could drop a chandelier in a closet,” Gelb said. Since the pandemic shutdown, his company has been on a quest “to do the most impossible things in a very small amount of space, and ‘Phantom’ — so big, so romantic, so impossible — seemed like a true challenge.”
Each night the story of the masked virtuoso wreaking havoc on a Paris opera house comes to life with inventive camera placements, props, silent movie titles and five performers, including the mezzo-soprano Sophie Delfus as Christine. It’s the company’s second collaboration with N.Y.U. Skirball, which also presented Theater in Quarantine’s creepy 3-D take on “Nosferatu” around Halloween in 2023. (That one is also available on YouTube.)
Taking narrative cues from both Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel and the 1925 film, Gelb and the show’s co-creator and scenographer Normandy Sherwood drew visual inspiration from Czech black-light theater, the surrealist filmmakers Karel Zeman and Jean Cocteau, and the illustrations of the English graphic artist Aubrey Beardsley. It also tries to deepen what Gelb sees as the book’s critique of institutional art-making. “The Phantom is a frustrated artist in the shadows of a crumbling institution,” he said.
“I find it an allegory,” he continued, “for a crumbling foundation in the arts that’s profound, particularly at a moment now where everything feels so tenuous.”
Running about one hour, the production is equal parts chilling, thrilling and incisive, taking jabs at the fictional opera house’s prospective donors and a mandate to keep subscribers happy.
Gelb said the show’s frights were more rooted in unnerving viewers than alarming.
“With ‘Nosferatu’ we were actively timing out jump scares in a way we’re not on this one,” Gelb said. “That said, I was surprised by the effectiveness of the face reveal” of the disfigured phantom.
But another vampire is returning to the city: “Bat Boy,” a cult-favorite musical that is getting a two-week New York City Center gala revival that begins performances Wednesday night. This quirky musical follows the discovery of a half-human, half-bat creature in a conservative West Virginia town whose residents quickly shun him. The production features a large ensemble cast, led by Taylor Trensch, and a 12-piece orchestra, up from the original’s band of five.
Based on the fictional character from the Weekly World News tabloid, the musical has a book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming and music by Laurence O’Keefe. The New York Times’s review of the show’s Off Broadway premiere read, in part: “It’s remarkable what intelligent wit can accomplish, even within an outlandish frame.”
In the years since, O’Keefe (“Legally Blonde” and the bloody “Heathers,” which is enjoying its first Off Broadway revival) has become known for crafting pop culture-minded musicals that blend high and low sensibilities. “Bat Boy” has been a continued labor of love for its three creators, who have revised it through various workshops and college stagings, as well as a production in London’s West End in 2004.
Alex Timbers, a director with similar high-low interests (and whose own horror comedy, “Beetlejuice,” is back on Broadway this season), joined them for a 2016 reading at New York’s Signature Theater. He remained committed to the piece and, when City Center approached him to direct their annual gala presentation of his choosing, he knew immediately what he would pick.
“This show has been performed all over the world, and many people under the age of 35 have been in it at their college,” Timbers said during a phone call. “So much of what City Center does is present shows that have had long lives, often on Broadway, so it’s fun to be reintroducing this one to New York.”
He added that updates to the script have continued: “It feels like a revival and a new production.”
Farley said in an interview last week that most of the changes to the musical have been a reshuffling of existing pieces to better establish the protagonist before introducing the world around him, though a handful of new songs have been added. Though Flemming was not able to fully participate in this iteration, he and O’Keefe ran virtually all changes by him.
With time, the view of “Bat Boy” as a parody show has evolved. (That original Times review deemed it “an omnibus parody, garish in almost every respect but constrained below the bar of foolishness.”) O’Keefe said he was glad to shed that description, especially as the team has leaned into an earnestness that, to them, originally felt trite.
“When we first wrote it, we made the last line of the show, ‘Don’t deny your beast inside,’ as a sort of joke, like, ‘Here’s your message,’” O’Keefe said. “But we actually mean it. We began to realize, ‘What if we applied that to everybody and made sure every major character was struggling with some inner demon?’”
Farley added: “We have a very shocking show, I think, but rather than jump scares we provide true horror, which is what people will do to each other if driven to extremes and this idea of scapegoating. It’s a town that is trying to pivot from coal mining to cattle ranching with some difficulty: Can you accept your failures or are you going to project and blame others?”
Still, O’Keefe said Timbers was an ideal director to handle both styles of fright.
“Alex puts equal thought into his musical theater staging and his sprays of blood,” he quipped. “There’s very well thought-out blood-gushing technology.”
The post A Spooky Season of Phantoms, a Bat Boy and More appeared first on New York Times.
