Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals

Bat Boy

Here now the phenomenon is taking place: the beginning, the Genesis, of a cultural revolution. It is taking place out of utter necessity to survive . . . Personally, I have little hope for the survival of our civilization. But whatever hope we have lies with our artists. For they alone have the ability (if we do not continue to corrupt them) to withstand the onslaught of the mass media and the multitude of false gods. They alone have the ability to show us ourselves. —Ralph Cook, quoted in Eight Plays from Off Off Broadway On the surface, Bat Boy: The Musical seems to be a wacky, bighearted satire about American prejudice. 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’reafraid,thatdrivesourhungersforsex,forfood,forpower, for control—and our fear of the Other. The last line of the show implores us, ‘‘Don’t deny your beast inside.’’ And that’s the heartofBatBoy,theknowledgethatweare,allofus,animalistic to one degree or another, and that we must embrace and integrate that side rather than fear it. The creators of Bat Boy: The Musical, 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 with only the thinnest layer of civilization as protection. Every one of the characters gives in to his or her inner beast at some point in the story, but because Edgar is different on the surface, he is 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 as technology moves forward faster than our ethics can, who knows what next? We face our inner Neanderthal in the characters of Bat Boy, and it’s a hell of a ride. But Bat Boy is also about storytelling itself. In Act II of the show, a Pan-like figure called simply ‘‘King of the Forest’’ appears to sing the slyly subversive song ‘‘Children, Children.’’ The opening lines, ‘‘Children, welcome home to where we all . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bat Boy 176 ] Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll, and Musicals began,’’ not only invite the young lovers Edgar and Shelley back to the roots of humanity and sex, urging them to embrace their more primal, animal natures, they 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 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. In the late 1990s, the American musical began returning once again to the roots of George M. Cohan and the earliest musical comedies, though now with a postmodern layer of irony on top. With the musicals built on the Rodgers and Hammerstein model, the actors and audiences have all agreed for the last sixty-plus years to pretend what was happening on stage was real. Of course, that was always a big stretch since the orchestra kept firing up and the actors would break into song. But with the early musical comedies, and now again with what many are calling postmodern musicals, the artifice of musical theatre isn’t just acknowledged (as the concept musicals of the ’70s did), it’s actively and aggressively referenced . These new shows remove the burden of ‘‘suspension of disbelief,’’ acknowledging it as fundamentally silly, completely taking that issue off the table. These more recent shows (Bat Boy, Urinetown, Avenue Q, Spelling Bee, and others) essentially say to their audiences, ‘‘We know and you know that none of this is real. We’re not pretending it is. We just want to tell you a great story.’’ And without the burden of naturalism, which musical theatre never really conquered, endless new possibilities are opened up. To be fair, Bat Boy is not about the conventions of Broadway musicals. Its authors have not written a musical about Broadway musicals. No, they wrote a show about a boy trying to find his place in the world, about the search for love, about past mistakes never really being past. But Bat Boy succeeds on more...