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Oh, Boy!
Bat’s entertainment at Brown
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
Bat Boy: The Musical
Story and book by Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming, music and lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe. Directed by John Emigh. With Lance Rubin, Nora Blackall, Caitlin Marshall, Jonathan Harris, and Steven Levenson. At Brown University Theatre through October 26.


You’ve probably seen the pictures in a series of articles — fabricated photos of a boy with pointy ears and sharp teeth, mouth wide open in either fright or threat. "BAT CHILD FOUND IN CAVE!," the Weekly World News blared in 1992.

Four years later, a couple of LA writer-performers pumped up the volume of outrageousness with Bat Boy: The Musical. The current giddily rambunctious production by Brown University Theatre/Sock and Buskin accomplishes the oddly unexpected, reaching through the hilarity to pluck a heartstring or two.

That’s not to say there’s even a drop of sentimentality wrung out of the paradigmatic " ‘human’ interest" story or that lambasting our schlock/shock cultural takes second place. No, we get a perky American family with a deep, dark secret David Lynch would love, plus a perky Christian community that changes its true colors faster than you can spook a chameleon, and a victim as innocent as an altar boy.

For nature lovers out there, the wild is put back into wildlife as we get an orgy of Julie Taymor-style forest creatures that even Walt Disney would have slapped a knee over. Social hypocrisy pops up in many forms here, at just about every opportunity in the West Virginia town of Hope Falls (swell the tense music), pop. 367.

In an unlit opening scene full of shrieks, townsfolk find the creature in a cave. Bound and tossed into a burlap bag, it is taken to the home of the local veterinarian, Dr. Thomas Parker (Benjamin Sugar). Doc is off shooting geese, but there to make a pet out of it are Endust-spraying wife Meredith (Caitlin Marshall) and hormone-burbling daughter Shelley (Nora Blackall). When the man of the house returns, he’s pretty quick to whip out his lethal-injection syringe, but Mrs. Parker says she’ll resume having sex with him, after a multi-year coitus hiatus, if he lets it live.

"It" is the operative word, the pronoun that the tale turns around. Sheep have been mysteriously dying — if incompetent animal husbandry is a mystery. The pointy-eared stranger is a convenient fall guy. When Doc starts feeding him blood after the creature gets all bleh over a bucket of KFC, we start wondering ourselves. After all, he did put someone in the hospital with a bite to the neck when he was captured.

None of this silliness would be worth more than a glance and a chuckle without the bravura performance of Lance Rubin as Bat Boy. Performances, actually. The feral boy clambering all over the towering cage at the Parkers’ is a hoot to watch as he sniffs and licks unfamiliar objects, making unearthly bleats. But then there’s the marvelous transitional musical number "Show You a Thing or Two," and Rubin’s transformation is as fascinating to watch as Michael Jackson morphing. As Shelley and Mrs. Parker teach the Bat Boy words, read him children’s books, and drill him on television personalities, someone who likes to be called Edgar emerges as from a cocoon.

Rubin really comes into his own as Edgar: a British-accented (thanks to BBC language tapes), tea-pouring, erudite, and ever-so-polite young man sporting mortar board and Brown graduation robes. Hilarious. Under the direction of John Emigh, Rubin plays him for real, and the Oxford don within him wins us over, though not the town. A revival meeting — the social event of the year — gives Edgar the opportunity to put the town’s Christian charity to the failed test in "Let Me Walk Among You."

Despite the frolicking ensemble production number of "A Joyful Noise," the townsfolk soon have second thoughts when challenged. Since the process of dehumanizing people is irrational, victims of the practice might as well be brilliant as half-human. Into the woods go Edgar and a by-now smitten Shelley, allowing Blackall to rivet us with a charming "Inside Your Heart" and Bat Boy to examine both sides of his nature, which is to examine ours. As the last lines in the musical, the company sings: "Know your Bat Boy, love your Bat Boy/Don’t deny the beast inside." Not your usual musical notion.

Some supporting performances stand out, especially Green’s assertive Mrs. Parker, and Steven Levenson’s wryly under-the-top Southern sheriff. But there are plenty enough funny lines to go around, in a musical where a daughter implores, "Oh, Mama, what are we gonna do?" and the reply is "We’re going to sing about it, Honey."

Nicole Applebaum’s choreography keeps the cast of 19 properly aswirl beneath the raised cage-like lattice that dominates Michael McGarty’s set design. Costume design by Phillip Contic is aptly full of cartoon colors. There’s plenty here to last us well past Halloween.


Issue Date: October 24 - 30, 2003
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