What Happens When ‘Bat Boy’ Grows Up?

In the standout first-act sequence of Bat Boy, the horror comedy gleefully sinks its teeth into My Fair Lady. A good Christian West Virginian veterinarian family has taken in the titular half-human half-bat, and they’re trying to teach him to be a civilized person. They get him to pronounce the names of farm animals, move onto flash cards with important proper nouns like “Champs-Élysées” and “Great White Way.” He adopts a BBC-ready accent—he’s been watching a lot of Masterpiece Theater—but still stumbles through until his father takes him aside and feeds him the blood of a rabbit. Suddenly everything clicks: “I think I’ve got it!” He screams, launching into one of the songwriter Laurence O’Keefe’s more inspired bits of condensed wordplay: “Brooklyn Bridge, Lenin’s Tomb, Watergate, Rainbow Room!” The names go on and on, a gleeful send-up of what was, at the time of its premiere in 1997, the peak of sophistication. (On the original cast recording, Bat Boy is aware of both Fargo and Remains of the Day; now, he’s up to date on Britney and Lord of the Rings.) It’s a nifty example of the tack Bat Boy tends to take as a show, too. O’Keefe and his fellow creators Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming spend a lot of energy dressing up a concept based on a farcical tabloid cover with classic-musical tropes like small-town small-mindness, star-crossed lovers, and a big gospel number, then undercutting them with messy, gory contradictions that defy the pat hopefulness of a lot of the genre. A “Do You Feel the Love Tonight”-esque forest fantasia in Act Two, for instance, ends with Bat Boy’s love interest offering him a sip from a vein.

This kind of sophomoric glee made the show a cult hit Off Broadway in the early 2000s and has ensured its lasting presence in the repertoire of amateur productions and musical-theater programs around the country. If you were in college in the decades since and didn’t know someone who did Bat Boy, you probably know someone who was mad that they weren’t allowed to—and, at the very least, someone who will lecture you about how O’Keefe went on to write the great pop-rock scores for Heathers and Legally Blonde. (That someone is me.) But what happens when Bat Boy tries to grow up? That’s the question raised by City Center’s two-week gala revival of the musical, directed by Alex Timbers, which gives the musical a sizeable name-brand Broadway cast, ample production values—David Korins has designed a multilevel cave of a set, bedecked with stalactites—and a larger band, though they’re not onstage in this production and there’s some muddiness in the sound mix. The revival also (shudder), has more of an earnest streak. Like Bat Boy himself in his three-piece suit, it’s not always the right fit, and at times the musical strains to be taken more seriously, though you can’t saw off those fangs entirely.

It takes awhile, up until that Henry Higgins-ish sequence, for this Bat Boy to find its tonal footing. Timbers, a showman whose early productions like Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson lived somewhere near Bat Boy’s level of resting irony, goes for a big dark-and-stormy spectacle early on. There’s crashing thunder and confusion as the ensemble stomps through a cave to find and capture Bat Boy himself. Taylor Trensch is ferociously committed, and is so animalistic cavorting around the stage in a bald cap and pointed ears it becomes surprising when he later reminds you that he can sing with precise emotional clarity. Trensch has a laser sense of how to land a physical gesture for comedy, and so do his adopted parents, played by the great hams Christopher Sieber and Kerry Butler. But they have a lot of exposition to get through before the bloody meat of this show arrives. First, they must set up their town’s hypocritical and empty Christianity—an easy South Park-ish target, 25 years ago or now—and a convoluted plot involving its attempts to pivot from coal mining into cattle ranching, which has been revised (“Another Dead Cow” is gone; there is now a scene where Sieber sticks his hand all the way into a cow’s reproductive system) but remains confusing. There’s also a growing romance between Bat Boy and his adoptive sister Shelley, played by a still-finding-her-way Gabi Carruba, which gets expanded with a weak new number, “Deer in the Headlights.”. I appreciate giving Shelley more interiority, though I’m baffled by the contradictory traffic instructions she delivers with the rhyme “then you gotta run some red lights / no more deer in the headlights.”

Luckily, by Bat Boy’s thrilling and chaotic Act One finale “Comfort and Joy,” this production has locked in, and the show’s wild and rangy second act is much more successful. The characters, after Bat Boy’s failed debutante moment at a church revival event, scatter into the woods, and Timbers and company have a lot more fun being a lot less buttoned up. Butler, who was in the original Off Broadway cast of Bat Boy as Shelley, has a real gift for the kind of mannered acting that sells horror comedy and musical camp (she’s a veteran of Little Shop and Xanadu), and she becomes ever-greater the more manic her character becomes. Jacob Ming-Trent and Alex Newell drop in to sing their hearts out as, respectively, a minister and the satyr god Pan. And Timbers channels the DIY energy of Peter and the Starcatcher for a sequence where we see Bat Boy’s true origins through shadow puppetry. While Timbers and O’Keefe have said they considered this revival with an eye to the show’s underlying message—essentially, don’t deny your inner beast—the idea comes across much better through gleeful nonsense than through tidiness. By the finale, we’ve moved past “be yourself” inspiration, anyway. In the grand tradition of Little Shop and Carrie, Bat Boy gives into its guignol instincts and provides us with a lot of blood. Thank god. Don’t we all, deep down, just want to rip the heads off stuffed animals?

Bat Boy is at New York City Center through November 9.