Boo! It’s Halloween, and the City Center Annual Gala Presentation is Bat Boy: The Musical. By the way, that opening “Boo!” is intended to recognize the holiday and is not meant as a comment on the now-playing Alex Timbers-directed production.
Or is it? Originally 1992 account in the tabloid Weekly World News of a so-called bat-boy living in a cave, it was musicalized in 1997 by story concocters and bookwriters Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming with Lawrence O’Keefe’s music and lyrics. All three of them, it’s blatantly clear, had the notion that they could infuse their imagined tale with all sorts of weighty metaphors.
Watching Bat Boy, a spectator might be prompted to consider a few underlying themes: schizophrenia, abounding communal fear of The Other, destructive religious fervor, rampant familial dysfunction, and the current DEI denigration. Though the creators wouldn’t have thought about it at the time, today the musical even conjures the widespread ostracizing of the trans population.
Indeed, the ability of Bat Boy to deal with these universal concerns suggest it meets the definition of a classic: pertinent to whichever era in which it’s viewed, always steadfast, always readjusting.
Sorry to report that Bat Boy: The Musical falls short of the designation of classic, although it does remain several notches above classic flop. Its besetting problem is the shambolic way in which Farley and Flemming dole out their story,
At the outset, the growling, crouching Bat Boy is discovered in Hope Falls, West Virginia. (Hope falls, get it?) At first, the Hope Falls denizens seem to love him. Within seconds they’re jubilantly singing: Love me Bat Boy/ Save me Bat Boy/ Make it turn out all right!
Their immediate acceptance hardly endures. In brief, Bat Boy is adopted by Meredith Parker (Kerry Butler), whose daughter Shelley (Gabi Carrubba) eventually falls in love with Bat Boy but whose husband, Dr. Parker (Christopher Sieber, on loan from Death Becomes Her), does anything but fall for Bat Boy. He becomes the boy’s chief menace.
Meredith gives pointy-eared Bat Boy the name Edgar, teaches him to leave his unintelligible guttural signs behind and speak perfect mid-Atlantic English so well that in cap and gown he attains a degree. (Is it a college degree?) He impresses himself as prepared to become a welcome addition to society. He doesn’t, instead spending a good deal of time as Meredith’s suave butler.
Sad to say, a major problem persists. The bat part of Bat Boy is a vampire. Yes, Bat Boy is part vampire bat; when hungry, he only craves blood. At one stressful moment Meredith herself opens a vessel. At another plot twist pregnant cow Gertie, due to deliver twins, is too enticing for as a blood source for Bat Boy Edgar.
On the subject of plot turns and twists, there’s the rub. Start to finish, it’s damnably repetitive. First, the Hope Fallsians accept Bat Boy (as in the song quoted above), then they reject him, then they accept him cheerfully, then they find a new reason to reject him, then they accept him, followed by a succession of head-spinning then-theys.
One has audience favorite Alex Newell showing up for no reason other than to strut her stuff joyously as The God Pan in a hotsy-totsy Jennfier Moeller costume. The song is “Children, Children,” for what that’s worth.
Be advised that a penultimate then-they has Meredith revealing a completely unexpected, (comically?) shocking fact. This one is so off the charts that the Farley-Flemming playwriting chutzpah deserves to be applauded. Bravo, you two lads.
What Bat Boy: The Musical has going for it is helmer Timbers’ cast going to town on a David Korins set, the backdrop of which features a huge, vampire-fanged open mouth. Along with Trensch, Butler, Sieber, and Newell, theater faves Andrew Durand, Alan H. Green, Marissa Jaret Winokur, Jacob Ming-Trent, and a handful of others act, sing, and dance (Connor Gallagher is the choreographer) as if they’re lucky to be in the greatest musical ever.
Of course, Butler and Trensch are the main characters. Butler, an accomplished trouper, was daughter Shelley in the 2004 Bat Boy at the Public, and returns this decade just as movingly motherly. If anything, her voice is even more clarion, which she especially proves on “Mine, All Mine.” Trensch, recently a Tony nominee, thanks to the Floyd Collins revival, is an ideal Bat Boy, narrow as a capital I and just as theater-wisely self-insistent.
A special shout-out to songwriter O’Keefe, who surely connected (along with Nell Benjamin) on the entertaining Legally Blonde. At a time when the rhyming craft is in unfortunate disrepair, he insists throughout on the perfect rhyme. Yup, he always rhymes, even if Bat Boy: The Musical doesn’t.
Bat Boy opened October 29, 2025, at City Center and runs through November 9. Tickets and information: nycitycenter.org
