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

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