Small Bat, Big Cave
By Josh Hightower
Bat Boy makes its New York City return.
Bat Boy has fangs if you’re close enough to see them.
The cult classic musical was an intriguing inclusion in City Center’s Encores season. Last produced in New York at the petite Union Square theatre in 2001, who could have guessed that over 20 years later, its return would be in a theatre nearly 5 times larger? With City Center’s sizable venue, comes its prestige. As a result, Bat Boy ends up with an embarrassment of riches, though one has to wonder if they are riches that the show really needs.
The show follows the mysterious, feral Bat Boy/Edgar (Taylor Trensch) being adopted by a stereotypical small-town family, the Parkers. As they domesticate him, he gets close to their daughter, Shelley (Gabi Carrubba), and the mother, Meredith (Kerry Butler), while having a murky relationship with the father, Dr. Parker (Christopher Sieber). Edgar and Shelley grow fond of each other, but their relationship is not what it appears to be. Despite the Parkers’ efforts, Bat Boy’s thirst for blood never fades, and strange events plague their town of Hope Falls. As fear and tension run high, a gory Act II contains shocking revelations that earn the show its teeth.
Stars such as Marissa Jaret Winokur, Andrew Durand, and many other Broadway veterans fill out the sizable ensemble. However, in a show that traditionally double and triple-casts characters, often in drag, an element of the show’s ferocious sense of humor is lost. Alex Timbers’ direction hardly feels like it is foaming at the mouth. The show is at its best when satirizing WASP-adjacent culture in songs like Three Bedroom House, in which Butler soars as a housewife who is far more than meets the eye.
However, the majority of the score is pop-rock, with grungy and raunchy songs that play far differently in the mammoth auditorium. One such example is Children, Children!, a song in which The God Pan — the painfully underutilized Alex Newell — teaches Edgar and Shelley about the birds and bees with an animal orgy in the forest. This draws a laugh, but never fills the space enough to become show-stopping.
The same is true of Bat Boy’s carnage. Trensch delivers an admirable performance as the half breed who desperately wants to fit into civilization, but fails to be menacing beyond the orchestra. In the end, the show was most like its titular character: forced into a setting in which it cannot thrive.
