Just in time for Halloween, could this finally be Bat Boy: The Musical’s moment?
The show—story and book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe—was first performed in 1997, and has had runs off-Broadway, in London and elsewhere. But so long away from the stage, and with so little known of it, has accorded the show a cult, curio status—perfect then for New York City Center’s Encores! slate, which revives, in semi-staged form, forgotten or neglected American musicals.
Packed with much-loved Broadway stars, this lovely, just-opened production (booking to Nov. 9)—directed by Alex Timbers and with lushly confident orchestration led by Andrew Resnick—brings Bat Boy blazing-eyed, mouth ringed with blood, triumphantly out of the shadows.
The story shares some similarities with many monster stories. Bat Boy (Taylor Trensch) is, just as his name suggests, a strange, part-bat, part-human creature with no language and a tangle of conflicting energies barely contained in bones and limbs.
Taken in by the Parker family—mom Meredith (Kerry Butler), daughter Shelley (Gabi Carrubba), and doctor dad Thomas (Christopher Sieber)—over time Bat Boy not only acquires human manners and language, but masters them. He is quickly transformed into a suave Noel Coward-esque young man, clad in a velvet smoking jacket with impeccable manners. Inevitably, he falls for Shelley, and she for him.
Yet within him the desire for blood runs deep. And the good doctor isn’t such a good doctor, especially when fired by jealousy over his wife’s dedication to helping Bat Boy over being an attentive wife to him. Bat Boy also faces peril from local townsfolk, horrified by having what they see as a murderous freak in their midst. Out come the pitchforks, and soon an increasingly demented and complicated tale unfolds of forbidden love, betrayal, secrets, and murder—with a bug-eyed Sieber armed with a fearsomely big syringe.
With traces of Rocky Horror, Little Shop of Horrors, and Frankenstein, Bat Boy elicits many laughs in its grab-bag of gruesome comedy-horror, but it also has traces of sharpness and darkness, with Thomas blackmailing his wife into sexual submission, the shadow of incest, Shelley’s wry lack of naivety (Carrubba gives her a ballsy, witty fierceness), and Meredith’s homeliness barely concealing a determination to control her own destiny.
The casting at Encores! continues to be ridiculously top-notch, with—in side roles, if you please!—Andrew Durand, Marissa Jaret Winokur, and Tony Award-winning Alex Newell; in singing “Children, Children,” the latter as the God Pan brings the house down as rapturously as they did singing “Independently Owned” in Shucked.
Amid a delicious roster of songs, the show’s central refrain, “Hold Me, Bat Boy,” was being repeated by audience members as they headed out into the night.
Trensch, contorting, stretching, and athletically leaping around David Korin’s stage of stairs and platforms, makes Bat Boy a seductively bizarre mix of innocence and pre-programmed, helpless killer. Bat Boy mirrors movements and song back to whoever he is with, and Trensch is as pristinely controlled when playing vulnerable and helpless or horny and out for blood. (One only hopes he has a good chiropractor.)
Butler, who played Shelley in the original production, makes Meredith the dynamic heart of the show, a warm-hearted, protective mother for sure, but also drily caustic and firmly directing domestic events with a soft voice that brooks no dissent. One of the show’s best numbers, sung by her and Shelley, is “Three Bedroom House,” which imagines what Meredith wants in brute economic terms after the chaos wrought by Bat Boy and the storm of bigotry and upset around his presence has abated.
The wonderful Sieber isn’t exactly unused to playing the mad scientist who’s also a pathetic flub—as his role in Death Becomes Her showed—and his comic timing and unhinged menace in Bat Boy is just as on point. The company playing townsfolk strongly voice their prejudice and fervent religious beliefs; at the top of act two “A Joyful Noise” is a gorgeous wall of gospel sound led by Jacob Ming-Trent as a booming-voiced reverend.
By the end, a dark origin story (including cross-species rape), and tragic body pile-up of Shakespearean proportions reveal themselves. There is even an ill-fated model cow, really the show’s only disappointment in light of the same stage once hosting the genius and majesty of the 2022 Into the Woods’ Milky White.
Just like that show—alongside Ragtime and other Encores! productions—this rendering of Bat Boy deserves its chance to shine on (or at least near, for an extended period of time) Broadway, after almost 30 years ruffling its wings in the theatrical shadows.
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