Hit Musical ‘Bat Boy,’ a Strange Beast, Seemed Unlikely to Fly

Move over, Hedwig. There’s a new freak storming off-Broadway. Bat Boy, the bloodsucking half-bat/half-human, flew from the pages of the Weekly World News tabloid to the 499-seat Union Square Theatre in downtown New York last month in “Bat Boy: The Musical.”

Though the title character comes from a cave in West Virginia, “Bat Boy: The Musical” was born and bred in Los Angeles. The comic rock musical originated at the Actors’ Gang in Hollywood, and, despite the common perception that L.A. plays don’t, well, play in New York, “Bat Boy: The Musical” has racked up raves from the mainstream New York Post (“an instant classic”) to the highbrow New Yorker (“smart, playful, and funny”). On April 3, it earned four Lucille Lortel Award nominations, the off-Broadway equivalent of the Tony Awards.

“Bat Boy” is the second Actors’ Gang show to mount a commercial production in New York. “I loved it,” says Tim Robbins, who founded the Actors’ Gang in 1982 and put in his two cents on the New York production by giving notes after previews. “The music was so good and the approach was so fresh. I love the idea of doing a real-life interpretation of a totally ridiculous newspaper story.”

The story of the musical’s inception and success is almost as improbable as that of its central character. Its playwrights were novices, its first production struggled with a paltry $12,000 budget, and yet “Bat Boy” went on to win so many grants and awards that it attracted some of the biggest off-Broadway producers. The authors, who claim to dislike musicals, are now being credited with helping to reinvigorate the genre--all while making fun of it.

The idea for the production started over a campfire on a film set in the Southern California desert. Keythe Farley, 36, an Actors’ Gang member, was starring in “Hang Your Dog in the Wind,” a low-budget independent film directed by Brian Flemming, 34. Farley brought a copy of the Weekly World News to the set, and, after wrapping for the day, the cast and crew sat around the campfire and laughed about the story of a changeling “discovered” in a cave. Over the next year or so, Farley, Flemming and other “Hang Your Dog” personnel would snap up any issue of the Weekly World News that featured the crazed beast (“Bat Boy Escapes!”), and they would make up songs about him at parties.

What they didn’t know was that Bat Boy was developing a cult following elsewhere, particularly among other Gen-Xers like themselves. Weekly World News sales increased every time Bat Boy’s bald and fanged face appeared on the cover of the tabloid. Farley and Flemming, sensing potential in this ugly little thing that bewitched them, hatched a plan to make it more than a running joke. “We decided this creature must sing,” says Farley, who wrote a letter on Actors’ Gang stationery to the tabloid, requesting permission to create a musical around him. To his surprise, he got a swift “yes” and a great option price: $1.

Farley and Flemming, who had previously collaborated on scripts for cable television and the Independent Spirit Awards show, set to writing a tragicomic musical of a freak of nature. But they didn’t want the show to be all kitsch. They consulted biblical stories, Greek mythology and New Age philosophies in their creation of a scapegoat who just wants to be loved.

“We used Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ as a handbook and tried to construct a story that had the power of a universal myth,” Flemming says. “That way we could let our comedic instincts run amok, and stage all sorts of interspecies sex orgies and other silliness and be confident it was all grounded in a plot worth paying attention to.”

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The play opens with Bat Boy biting some pot-smoking spelunkers who invade his cave. The injured kids bring their strange find to the sheriff of Hope Falls, W.Va. He, in turn, palms the rabid animal off on the town veterinarian, Dr. Parker. It is assumed that Parker will destroy the creature in the best interests of the town. Instead, the vet, his wife and daughter undertake the education of Bat Boy, and, surprisingly, the little thing takes quite well to everything from tea service to locution lessons. Still, the town is torn over whether to allow the bloodsucker to live as a human--especially after he falls in love with Shelley, the Parkers’ daughter.

All of this happens in production numbers that evoke Disney bombast warped through “South Park” minds, and to the tune of rock, hip-hop and show-tune music with witty lyrics by Laurence O’Keefe, 31, who also wrote the music for “The Mice,” one of three short musicals in the upcoming production of “3hree” at the Ahmanson Theatre.

O’Keefe was another member of the Actors’ Gang whom Farley and Flemming approached after they had written their script. In him, they knew they found a composer and lyricist who understood their title character: “He’s a brilliant savant with the soul of a poet but also a vicious animal who feels the constant urge to drink blood and squat in his own filth,” says O’Keefe, whose comedic chops were cut doing Hasty Pudding Theatricals at Harvard. “I don’t think there has been such a character in public consciousness since, I don’t know, Bill Clinton.”

The three creators brought the musical to the Actors’ Gang in 1997. “I know almost nothing about traditional musicals,” Farley says. “In fact, musical-theater types were always the ones we made fun of in high school. And with ‘Bat Boy,’ I guess we still are.” The Actors’ Gang, which is known for such experimental pieces, helped get a grant for the production and provided their small, secondary space in back of the main theater.

“The workshop space gives people a low-cost, low-impact way of growing a piece,” Robbins says. “It’s a place where you can risk failure, and even failing is OK in that space because there’s no better way to learn.”

“Bat Boy” didn’t fail. It sold out every night of its seven-week run and was later awarded a total of $80,000 in development grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was named musical of the year by the “LA Weekly” and garnered six Drama-Logue Awards, three Garland Awards from Backstage West and four nominations for Theatre LA’s Ovation Awards.

Deven May, who played Bat Boy, won an Ovation Award for best actor for his ability to embody a violent beast who is somehow sympathetic--and also for his ability to belt out songs while hanging upside-down from one arm. (He reprises the role in New York, to much acclaim.)

Energized by “Bat Boy’s” success, its creators found an agent and shopped the strange little show around. In a turn of events almost as unlikely as in a musical, the novices attracted a gaggle of veteran producers, including Kevin McCollum, a producer on “Rent”; Nancy Nagel Gibbs, the manager of the original “Little Shop of Horrors”; and Jean Doumanian, who produces Woody Allen films.

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In a subplot worthy of “42nd Street,” Nagel Gibbs, who also manages the hit “De La Guarda,” had been invited to the first New York staged reading of “Bat Boy” but initially declined. “The postcard had this scary face on it, and I thought, ‘This is not for me,’ ” says Nagel Gibbs. But a colleague dragged her to the show, and Nagel Gibbs was smitten. “It was not predictable,” she says. “It was not superficial in the human emotions, and that excited me. I became obsessed with it.”

Though Farley had directed the L.A. production himself, the writers now recruited Scott Schwartz, an ambitious young director who co-directed “Jane Eyre” on Broadway and is directing “Lavender Girl,” another musical in “3hree.” Schwartz helped bring the show from its “ghetto production” (as Flemming called it) to its relatively high-budget spectacle in downtown New York. So far, the critics approve: Two papers ran the headline “Bat Boy Hits Home Run,” and Schwartz is hailed for staging that’s “mad fun at 100 miles an hour.” Like Bat Boy himself, Farley and Flemming have learned a bit about the world outside their own microcosm.

They are now fielding offers for international rights and a movie deal. But their tenacious love of “Bat Boy” has kept them protective of him from the start. Even before the New York production, when producers were sniffing around this possible cult hit, the budding playwrights took a meeting on film rights to the show. “We walked out of the meeting, and Brian [Flemming] was laughing at the offer,” says Mitch Watson, who produced the L.A. run of “Bat Boy.” “Brian said, “If we’re going to sell this, it’s going to be for a million dollars.’ ”