Christian Charity

This is the third time I'm directing Bat Boy. A couple nights before we opened, our intern Aiden asked me if I've learned anything new this third time. I couldn't think of anything specific.

And then it hit me. I've always thought of this story as one about bigotry and religious hypocrisy. But it's both bigger and simpler than that.

It's about fear.

It's about that famous saying of Yoda's, "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." That's what happens in Bat Boy. That's also what's been happening in the Trump era.

Like the town in Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle, Hope Falls, the setting for Bat Boy, is a town in crisis, in other words, it's America 2025 in miniature. The town's primary industry, coal mining, is gone, and the people of Hope Falls have turned to ranching, at which they really do not excel. All their cattle are dying because they don’t know how to raise cattle (“A mountain’s no place to raise cows,” the finale reminds us), but rather than acknowledge their own inadequacies, they look for a scapegoat.

Edgar shows up in town and they get their scapegoat. The ranchers fear financial ruin, which leads to anger, which leads to hate (they all sing, "Kill the Bat Boy!"), and that hate leads to quite a bit of suffering.

In the process, these characters palpably evoke our crippled country right now. One of the many problems with our broken politics today is the idea that I must win and you must lose -- that politica are a war now instead of argument and compromise and solutions. Blame is how I win. Whether it's true or not, it seems the one who blames first wins the battle.

It's a terrible way to run our country or a town of five hundred.

Bat Boy satirizes misinformation and disinformation, religious extremism and hypocrisy, and also religion as a misused socio-political force; but it doesn’t poke fun at Christianity itself or at people of genuine faith. The people of Hope Falls frequently proclaim their “Christian Charity,” but it’s clear from their behavior that they aren’t nearly as Christian as they claim to be. It seems everyone in town loves exclaiming “Sweet wounded Jesus!” when they’re surprised, and yet one would assume that serious Christians wouldn't take the Lord’s name in vain on such a regular basis.

The townspeople initially blame the death of their cows on God. They also talk about doing horrible things to Edgar and later, they threaten Dr. Parker, all the while pretending that their actions reflect their “Christian charity.”

You may disagree but this is 21st century American Christianity.

The song “Comfort and Joy” shows how misguided the people of Hope Falls (and America) are. 2nd Corinthians 1:23-24 says, “Our strength and ability are owing to faith; and our comfort and joy must flow from faith.” But these people are asking God to give them comfort and joy outright. They’ve got it backwards; they don’t understand that joy comes from faith, which they don’t have. They believe their comfort and joy will result from the destruction of an innocent life. They sing:

Comfort and joy,
Comfort and joy!
Kill the bat boy,
Kill the bat boy!

On the other hand Meredith has it right.  She sings:

He will show them he’s not
What they’re terrified of.
He will show them a love
They can never destroy.
If we prove that they’re wrong,
They’ll come ‘round before long,
And we’ll all sing a song
Full of comfort and joy.

Out of context, that could be Jesus' disciples talking about how the priests and the pharisees will react to Jesus -- fear, hate, suffering. Edgar the Bat Boy is explicitly a Christ-like figure throughout the story.

It’s significant that Meredith better understands the teachings of the Bible and that she alone in Hope Falls practices actual Christian charity by insisting on caring for Edgar, by teaching him, by making him a part of the family. In the first dialogue scene in the show, Meredith even quotes Romans 6:23 at Shelley: “For the wages of sin is death…”, though she conveniently (comically) leaves out the more positive rest of the sentence.

In this story, the wages of sin are death, and maybe Meredith’s past and present circumstances lead her in that direction unconsciously. In this world of faux Christians, only Edgar sincerely seeks God, first praying to him in “Comfort and Joy,” then hoping for divine healing at the revival meeting, then in his testimony before the congregation. Edgar believes that God can help him.

Of course, he's wrong.

The people of Hope Falls -- and America in 2025 -- practice a poisoned, hypocritical brand of Christianity that has corrupted American culture today, and because this is the only kind of Christianity Edgar experiences, it prevents Edgar from finding God as he had hoped.

It’s also significant that the one explicitly religious figure in the show, the Reverend Hightower, is not a source of satire. He accepts Edgar without reservation. Even though the people of Hope Falls have asked the Reverend to come to town for all the wrong reasons (the cows), he’s still there hoping to do some good. And like Meredith, he accepts Edgar unconditionally. The Reverend Hightower, the one genuine Christian in the story, invites Edgar up on stage to be healed and urges the congregation to accept him, to assimilate him into the community. And though they are initially willing, their misplaced fear and hatred are easily revived by Bat Boy's supervillain, Dr. Parker.

Like many American musicals before it, Bat Boy is a story about an Outsider who meets a Community; the Outsider must learn to assimilate into the Community or be removed, through death or banishment.

In Oklahoma!, Brigadoon, Guys and Dolls, Hello, Dolly!, Annie Get Your Gun, The Music Man, Pippin, Hedwig, the heroes assimilate and become part of the community (and/or the chorus) by the end. But in Carousel, The King and I, Pal Joey, West Side Story, Hair, Evita, Passion, Sweeney Todd, Urinetown, Cabaret, Rocky Horror, Bonnie & Clyde, the heroes cannot assimilate and must leave or be removed. In a few shows, with more than one hero, we get both outcomes, as in South Pacific, Show Boat, and The Wild Party.

In a few (usually satiric) cases, the community actually adjusts to accommodate the hero, as in The Threepenny Opera, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and Heathers.

By the end of Bat Boy's first act, we realize that Edgar the Bat Boy isn't the only outsider; in this story, the entire Parker family are the outsiders, and the question is whether Edgar and the Parkers can assimilate -- and maybe also, why would they want to? Hope Falls (i.e., America) is a really fucked up place.

In the era of concept musicals and rock musicals, the musical theatre stories have focused more on the hero, his struggle, his growth, his success or not, in shows like Company, Pippin, Dude, Jesus Christ Superstar, Follies, Chicago, Barnum, Sweeney Todd, Nine, Sunday in the Park with George, Passing Strange, Hamilton, A Strange Loop, and so many others. Bat Boy fits into this category as well.

Most of this stuff is under the surface, most of it the audience doesn't consciously recognize, but it's what makes this story so powerful, so recognizably truthful, and so deeply human.

Even the third time around, it has been such a joy to live inside this material for a few months. It's not just funny and big-hearted, it's also masterfully constructed, and that's part of why it's so powerful.

Bat Boy runs through October 25. Get your tickets!

Long Live the Musial!
Scott

A Filthy Freak Who's Just Like You

Bat Boy is a weirdly wonderful mashup of extreme silliness and deadly seriousness. Part of the glorious stunt of this musical is how adroitly it jumps back and forth between -- and often straddles -- a silly, obviously aftiticial, musical comedy world and our seriously fucked-up real world. As I wrote in my director's notes for the program, "This is a very funny show but a very serious story."

You might call it Seriously Silly. Or just razor-sharp social satire. One of our reviewers thinks the show is flawed because it needlessly mocks "hillbilly stereotypes." No, Bat Boy mocks all of us, collectively and individually. No one escapes unscathed, and these days, none of us deserves to.

As the opening number says, "Heed the tale of a filthy freak... who's just like you." Later in the song, they sing to us, "He has suffered, and now it's your turn." From the show's first song, Bat Boy makes it clear -- we are the target of the satire.

I invented a label for this kind of show a while back -- a neo musical comedy, a show that uses the devices and conventions of musical comedy, but in the service of more serious underlying socio-political themes. These shows emerged most obviously in the mid- to late 1990s, Bat Boy, Urinetown, A New Brain, Floyd Collins, The Ballad of Little Mikey, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and others. But a few neo musical comedies had popped up over the years before that time, like Anyone Can Whistle, Chicago, Merrily We Roll Along, Little Shop of Horrors, Assassins, and of course, the 1928 OG neo musical comedy, The Threepenny Opera. 

After last season of New Line revivals, I had decided we wouldn't repeat any more shows for a while. After all, there are so many wonderful shows out there to produce.

But as we discussed shows for this season, the real world was beginning to come apart at the seams. I reminded myself that New Line always has an obligation to speak to this moment. All artists do. And I couldn't think of a musical that better captures this zeitgeist than Bat Boy, even though we've produced it twice before, in 2003 and 2006.

Stephen Sondheim has said that the purpose of art is to make order out of the chaos of our world. That's a hell of a task right now -- there's a lot of chaos -- Americans' toxic love of Othering is in overdrive. But I believe Bat Boy is up to that challenge. Specifically because it is as silly as it is. A spoonful of sugar...

Scholars say that autocrats take seven steps to fully seize power:

Corrupting elections
Aggrandizing executive power
Politicizing independent institutions
Controlling information
Scapegoating and stoking division
Quashing dissent
Incentivizing violence

One big component of that agenda, part of steps 4, 5, and 6, is silencing the comedians. We just watched it happen in our real world, with the forced retirement of Stephen Colbert and the (brief) cancelation of Jimmy Kimmel's show.

Autocrats, dictators, and their ilk know well that they must fear comedy. Comedy is subversive by definition, and it's also revealing. America has a proud tradition of edgy political humor, with Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Chris Rock, the Smothers Brothers, Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Dave Chappelle, and so many others. The nationwide bipartisan backlash over Kimmel proves that tradition is alive and well.

Closer to home, New Line has been permanently blacklisted by the Missouri Arts Council over our recent shows that included gay characters and drag performances, in The Rocky Horror Show and Rent. That certainly sucks for our company, but even though the government can take away our grant money, they can't stop us from telling stories about the truly fucked-up world around us. And I'm sure we can agree, it is truly fucked up right now.

Just wait till they get a load of Promenade in March!

Make no mistake, it's not a desire for escape or disconnection that makes us love comedy; it's the exact opposite, the need for connection and shared truth. We laugh because we are surprised and because we recognize the truth. Both those things will happen to you as you watch Bat Boy. A lot.

Whether you like it or not.

We can't do a lot about all the ugly shit happening in the world right now, but we can do this one small thing -- we can share stories that help us all understand the raging maelstrom swirling around us. To quote my director's notes again --

This is about us. Right here. Right now.

Long Live the Musical!
Scott

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

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

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