He Has Suffered and Now It's Your Turn

It all started with the satirical supermarket tabloid, Weekly World News. This brilliantly funny newspaper boasted outrageous headlines over the years like “Dead Rock Stars Return on Ghost Plane!” and “Faces of Howard Stern, Pamela Anderson and Satan Appear in Volcano Smoke!” and the classic, “Bill Catches Hillary With Space Alien!,” a story that claimed one of the best subheads in the history of newsprint: “I thought she was gay, says stunned ex-Prez.”

The paper once ran a story called, “Surprising Bible Prophecies Your Preacher Doesn't Want You to Read,” about a “turncoat Vatican librarian” who has revealed parts edited out of the Bible, including an unknown corollary to the Tenth Commandment: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife unless you in turn are willing to share thine own wife with him.”

In 2001, The Washington Post published a tribute article to the tabloid, saying, “Funnier than Saturday Night Live, deeper than Leno or Letterman, smarter than Mad, more outrageous than The Onion, Weekly World News just might be America's best purveyor of social satire. The fact that it's disguised as a sleazy tabloid just makes it that much more delicious.”

Back in 1992, the Weekly World News began following every twist and turn in the bizarre life of a poor half-bat/half-boy who was found in a rural West Virginia cave. The paper dispatched a crack team of twenty-four reporters and photographers assigned exclusively to the bat boy story.

The paper described him this way: “Discovered in a cave in Hope Falls, West Virginia, this half-bat has escaped from captivity and is currently at large. He can be identified by large, pointy ears and oversized eyes that make him profoundly sensitive to sound and light. The creature has reportedly attacked at least three people with his razor-sharp fangs and should be considered extremely dangerous.”

The paper chronicled how he initially attacked a 10-year-old girl; how he was captured by the government and then got sick; how he received 17,402,901 get-well cards in the hospital from Weekly World News readers, how sympathetic nurses fed him flies; how he escaped from the hospital by crawling from a sixth-story window; how his abrupt withdrawal from hospital drugs caused him to go crazy and attempt to mate with a scarecrow; how he was chased by a bloodthirsty bounty hunter; how he was run over by an exterminator's truck; how he showed up mysteriously at Al Gore’s campaign headquarters in 2000, wanting to officially endorse Gore; how he tried to sneak into the White House to visit Jenna Bush; and most notably, how he joined the U.S. military in Afghanistan because his special bat vision made it easy for him to find the Taliban in all those caves.

In November 1996, two writers were standing in the lobby of the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Los Angeles. Keythe Farley, Gang member and director, and Brian Flemming, a screenwriter and film director, were working the concession stand for intermission of the musical Euphoria, when in wandered Laurence O’Keefe, the composer-lyricist and music director of Euphoria, taking a break. Farley and Flemming told O’Keefe they liked his music and lyrics and asked if O’Keefe would be interested in a project of theirs, based on a character from the pages of the Weekly World News named Bat Boy. They showed O’Keefe a cover of the Weekly World News featuring the bat boy’s picture, a baby with huge fangs, bulging eyes and pointy ears. They were determined to tell this poor creature’s story – from the beginning.

O’Keefe was shocked. “That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

On Halloween 1997, Bat Boy made its world premiere at the Actors’ Gang Theatre, perhaps the only place where this show would be understood and properly nurtured. The Actors’ Gang is Los Angeles’ premier repertory theatre company, creating original works and reinterpreting classics, through the prism of The Style, a performance method derived from commedia dell’arte, from the work of the Theatre du Soleil in Paris, from vaudeville, from the political agitprop theatre of the 1930s, and from the off off Broadway movement of the 1960s, particularly the work of the Play-House of the Ridiculous. The Style is artificial and presentational, yet insists on deep truthfulness and high emotional stakes. All the authors agree today that The Style was instrumental in both the writing and the execution of Bat Boy the Musical.

O’Keefe says, “The Actors' Gang is a hyperactive and politically committed theater company that teaches if you show an emotion, always make it a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10. People pay money to see a show portray terror, rage, despair and joy, so we might as well sell it in megadoses. We were consciously trying to dig up the deepest and most volcanic emotions, the most inflammatory questions – what is it like to be a scapegoat? what is it like to be loved by one parent and hated by another? What is it like to have no idea who your parents are? What is it like to have an insatiable hunger for blood?”

Director and co-author Keythe Farley developed what Flemming likes to call the “take-it-so-seriously-it's-funny-but-it-also-hurts” style of Bat Boy. Both Deven May (as Edgar) and Kaitlin Hopkins (as Meredith) were in this first production and, together with Farley, they found the extremely sincere approach that this outrageous musical demands. Farley’s mantra throughout the development process was “the height of expression, the depth of sincerity,” a style of truthful acting that marked all the work at the Actors’ Gang – something the cast took to heart and something which guided them throughout the L.A. and New York productions. Brian Flemming says of his partner, “Keythe's major contribution to Bat Boy has gone largely unmentioned, but it was great and permanent.”

Unlike musicals in which the goal is to be as silly as possible (The Producers, Spamalot, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels), with Bat Boy the goal is to be as serious as possible within the context of an utterly silly universe.

Julio Martinez wrote in Variety, “The clever scenario, though outrageous, always contains an aura of intriguing plausibility. And to his credit, Farley creates a supercharged mix of heightened realism, surrealism and fantasy that is always engrossing. The work is magnificently served by the emotion-charged, thoroughly realistic performance of Devon May [as the Bat Boy], who catapults himself body and soul into the seared psyche of this child who possesses the mind of a genius but the uncontrollable, blood-craving appetite of a beast.”

Throughout 1999 and 2000, the show went through staged readings at the Directors’ Company in New York, now with director Scott Schwartz at the helm. The pace of the work was stepped up, aiming toward a 2001 New York opening, with rewrites continuing even after opening. The collaboration among the writers was an unusually close one, free of ego. O’Keefe says, “I would take a character's speech and replace it with sung lyrics, or sometimes even take a line of dialogue and set it verbatim to music. Sometimes it worked in the opposite direction – we'd try a song in one place and realize it stole ideas or energy from a better song later, so the song would disappear and be replaced by new dialogue.”

Bat Boy opened at the Union Square Theatre in New York in March 2001, where it was a hit but suffered the same fate as many other New York shows after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and it closed that December. It’s tempting to guess how long the show would have run if not for the terrorist attacks and whether it would have moved uptown to Broadway like Urinetown did.

But in a post-9/11 world, the hatred and discrimination leveled against the Bat Boy in the show took on a whole new dimension, as anyone in America with a Middle Eastern background was now a potential victim of abuse, harassment, and even imprisonment, based only on their appearance, their ethnicity, their clothing. The metaphor that was Bat Boy now held a power wholly unanticipated by its creators.

The New York Times said of the off Broadway show, “It's remarkable what intelligent wit can accomplish... the show is a jaggedly imaginative mix of skewering humor and energetic glee.” The New York Post said, “Bat Boy soars! An instant classic!” The New York Daily News called it “an outrageously silly and totally charming show. . . wickedly funny! A wacky, hilarious musical!” USA Today called it “immensely satisfying.” Backstage said, “Rarely do we see a piece of theatre that is at once so smart, silly, self-aware, and easy to enjoy as Bat Boy the Musical.” 

Two years later, New Line negotiated the rights to the regional debut of the show. Our 2003 production sold out every night, and for months afterward, people were literally begging us to bring the show back. So in 2006, we did.

And now here we are nineteen years later, returning to Hope Falls again. Each time I've encountered the show, in its original 2001 off Broadway production, our productions in 2003 and 2006, and now our production this fall. Each time it seems like Bat Boy has absolutely nailed the zeitgeist, and it's the same today. So much of this ferocious satire feels like it could have been written this year.

I've come to realize that great works of art are always relevant, no matter when you interact with them. That's why people keep doing Shakespeare plays. That's why we sometimes produce older shows like The Threepenny Opera or Anything Goes. Their satire is still as timely and funny and relevant as ever. 

And what does that say about us?

As odd as it may sound, Bat Boy really is great art. As funny and silly as it is, it's a very serious piece of well-made theatre about very serious things. And you'll laugh your ass off all evening.

What could be better than that?

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To get your 2025-2026 New Line season tickets, click here.

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BAT BOY No. 3

I first saw Bat Boy off Broadway in March 2001 and I fell madly in love. And trust me, "madly" is the right word. May the theatre gods bless the writers who were crazy (or stoned) enough to write a musical based on a story in the satirical tabloid, Weekly World News.

I saw this mad mashup of musical comedy, love story, and horror-thriller again in October 2001, just before it closed, prematurely. Once the tourists stopped coming after the Sept. 11 attacks, a lot of good shows had to close.

I think it could have transferred uptown and enjoyed a healthy Broadway run. It wasn't just insanely funny -- it was one of the smartest, best built, most ridiculous, most fearless, most sophisticated, most enjoyable pieces of theatre I had ever seen. I'm not kidding -- I thought to myself, oh my god, they wrote this for ME! On that same trip to see Bat Boy again, I also got to see Urinetown for the first time, and had about the same reaction.

It was a good trip.

It was the beginning of a new Golden Age of Musical Theatre, starting in the very late 1990s and still continuing today. Our art form has never been so interesting, so inventive, so fast evolving, so full of explosive potential.

As soon as performance rights were released for Bat Boy we snatched them up and produced the show in spring 2003. One of the original off Broadway cast, St. Louisan Doug Storm, came to see us, which was very cool. After we closed, we kept getting asked when we would bring the show back. People who had seen it wanted to see it again. People who missed it, really wanted to see it. So we brought it back in 2006, with seven of the ten actors from 2003 returning. It sold out every performance, just like our first run.

When we closed our second run, I made sure to preserve the bat baby and the cow head. (If you don't know what that means, don't worry, you'll find out when you see the show.) I knew we New Liners would return to Hope Falls someday for a third production. It took us nineteen years, but here we are.

We're here because we need this story, right here, right now.

On its silly surface, Bat Boy seems to be a wacky though big-hearted satire about American prejudice and the hypocrisy of modern religion. But dig a little deeper, venture down into the dark caves and chambers of human emotion, and you’ll find a bigger, more interesting idea that underpins everything else in the show: we all have an animal side, a primitive, primordial beast in us that lashes out when we’re afraid, that drives our hungers for sex, for food, for power, for control – and of course, fear of The Other.

Just as it is with Frankenstein, it's not the monster who's the monster.

The last line of the show implores us, half-kidding, half-serious, “Don’t deny your beast inside.” And that’s really the heart of Bat Boy, the knowledge that we are, all of us, animal to one degree or another, and that we must embrace and integrate that side rather than fear it -- but also that we must not allow it to take control.

The creators of Bat Boy, Keythe Farley, Brian Flemming, and Laurence O’Keefe, have given us a hero who literally, physically embodies that dangerous mix. Edgar the Bat Boy represents every one of us, always trying to control our beast inside with only the thinnest layer of civilization as protection.

A layer that seems to get thinner every day.

Each character in the show gives in to his or her inner beast at some point in the story, but because Edgar is so obviously different on the surface, he's the one to be ridiculed, scorned, feared. We see in this beautiful, hilarious fable not only our own inner struggles, but also echoes of racism past and present (even the rationale for slavery), and of anti-gay and anti-trans laws. As technology evolves faster than our ethics, who knows who's next?

We face our inner Neanderthal in the characters that populate Bat Boy, and it’s a hell of a ride. In the age of social media, it's also more important than ever for us to do that.

But Bat Boy is also about the act of storytelling itself. In Act II of the show, a Pan-like figure called “King of the Forest” appears, to sing the slyly subversive song “Children, Children,” a pop anthem about inter-species sex. The opening lines, “Children, welcome home to where we all began,” not only invite the young lovers Edgar and Shelley back to the roots of humanity and procreation, urging them to embrace their more primal, animal natures, but these lines also invite the audience back to the roots of theatre, back to mythic stories told around a fire, back to Grotowski’s “poor theatre,” where it’s all about the storytelling, not the budget, where originality is more important than money or technology, where the audience’s imagination is the final vital ingredient.

All the usual tricks and illusions of theatre are revealed in this show. There is no deception, no suspension of disbelief, just the naked honesty that we're all there in the theatre together to share a story. Nobody needs to be fooled. The audience's imaginations can fill in the world around these characters; in fact, audiences enjoy doing that.

There are productions that engage the audience in the act of storytelling, and there are productions that leave the audience passive and unengaged, with huge sets and projections doing the storytelling work instead of the audience's imaginations. That's less fun.

By rejecting some of the more ridiculous conventions of contemporary commercial theatre (musical or non-), by insisting on a theatre of imagination instead of high-tech machines, by using imaginative techniques from the world of improv and experimental theatre, Bat Boy does comment on other musicals, intentionally or not. By its very existence and its artistic quality, Bat Boy argues that too many musicals (especially in New York commercial theatre) have gone too far, have gotten too high-tech and too expensive, and they've lost the simplicity and joy of human-to-human storytelling.

Bat Boy has a small cast, a small budget, no helicopters or chandeliers, no special effects, and yet it doesn’t suffer for all that – it ends up being more fun, more transporting, more magical, more emotional, more intense, because it goes back to the roots of storytelling and relies on its audience to participate in the magic.

Edgar the Bat Boy tries to teach the people of Hope Falls about tolerance and acceptance, while Bat Boy the musical tries to teach us, the audience, about what really matters in the theatre – relationships, emotions, people.

Especially right now.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

P.S. To check out my newest musical theatre books, click here.

P.P.S. To get your 2025-2026 New Line season tickets, click here.

P.P.P.S. To get your Bat Boy tickets, click here.

P.P.P.P.S. To donate to New Line Theatre, click here