Review: Bat Boy, a One-Joke Musical Given the Deluxe Treatment at New York City Center

Everyone has their favorite cult musical. Mine is Reefer Madness, a show I’ve been waiting years to see revived. Many others feel the same way about Bat Boy, a horror comedy that ran off-Broadway in 2001, spawned a cast album, and has since become a staple of college and community theater. It certainly has its charms, but it’s never been my jam: I just don’t find it funny. That said, while Alex Timbers’s lavishly funded revival at New York City Center only reaffirms my feelings about the property, he and his crew manage to unearth at least four or five additional laughs within this one-joke concept, which, honestly, is pretty impressive.

With a book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, and a score by a pre-Legally Blonde, pre-Heathers Laurence O’Keefe, Bat Boy spins an entire story out of the supermarket tabloid headline about a bat/human hybrid discovered in a cave in West Virginia. The Bat Boy himself, eventually named Edgar (played by a game Taylor Trensch, with pointy ears and a bald cap), is found in the hick town of Hope Falls and is taken in by the family of the local vet, Dr. Parker (Christopher Sieber, one of the few cast members whose brows are arched high enough to make it work).

Dr. Parker’s wife, Meredith (Kerry Butler), and daughter, Shelley (Gabi Carrubba), are instantly enamored by Edgar’s innocence, teaching him how to act and speak like a “normal” boy. Before long, Edgar’s sporting a British accent and a collection of cravats. But his efforts to fit in with society—even a redneck society like that of Hope Falls—are doomed once Dr. Parker realizes that his family’s affection lies more with their new houseguest than with him.

Shows like Bat Boy walk a fine line, one that Farley, Flemming, and O’Keefe have spent decades paving over. Over the years, they’ve leaned more heavily into the earnestness of the story—the attempt to fit into a world that doesn’t accept you—a concept their younger selves once probably scoffed at. Certain things still work like gangbusters, especially a “Rain in Spain”-like sequence where Meredith and Shelley teach Edgar proper etiquette. Butler, the original Shelley off-Broadway, now in mom-mode, absolutely decimates her big number, “Three Bedroom House,” directly followed by Alex Newell strutting onstage as Pan, Greek God of nature, and demolishing what’s left of the City Center ceiling with “Children, Children.”

But these moments of delicious mischief aren’t plentiful enough to sustain two acts and nearly two-and-a-half hours. As an example of early career, pre-9/11-era juvenilia, the show is impressive. By contemporary standards, not so much. Timbers, a master of both the macabre and the ironic who has been shepherding the show through readings for the past decade, is fully attuned to the material’s strengths and weaknesses, shaping moments to mask the flaws. The climactic revelation of the Bat Boy’s origin was funny in a pitch-black way back in the day, but (spoiler alert) does a woman getting raped by a pack of bats fit in with the newfound emphasis on sincerity? Not really. Timbers uses Pee-wee Herman-style shadow puppetry to make it work.

Meanwhile, the townspeople amble on and off in hysterics but without much impact, despite being played by the likes of comedic geniuses Marissa Jaret Winokur, Tom McGowan, Andrew Durand, and Mary Faber (a lot of the songs that distinguished the tangential characters are gone). And no matter how much sweetness and charm Trensch infuses within Edgar, it’s still the story of a boy who’s a bat, except now the writers want us to take it seriously.

Still, Timbers has given Bat Boy the production it could only dream about, with a multilevel fun house of a set (David Korins), quirky costumes (Jennifer Moeller), B-movie lighting (Justin Townshend), and one hilarious cow puppet (Ray Wetmore and JR Goodman). A 12-piece band has replaced the original five, so the music has more drive (orchestrations are by O’Keefe and Ben Green). Let’s not too deeply criticize Nevin Steinberg’s sound, which had the usual opening-night jitters.

In short, there’s clearly a future life at stake—City Center productions, even galas like this, are never so visibly monied. But to go the Broadway route would lose the incendiary spirit even further. There’s a reason why Little Shop of Horrors works so well at the Westside Theatre, and the backers of Bat Boy would be wise to follow that example.