‘Bat Boy: The Musical’
City Center Encores!
Through November 9

The first thing we hear in “Bat Boy: The Musical” is the electrifying shriek of a heavy metal-style guitar, followed by a hauntingly melancholy, minor-key baroque string line — something similar to the Bach “Toccata and Fugue” as performed by the Phantom of the Opera.  In fact, it’s almost a direct parody of the opening of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Phantom,” with its now-familiar souffle of hard rock, classical music, and Broadway. 

We are warned to be wary: not of monsters and ghouls, but of the musical schlock that will soon be visited upon us. Forewarned is forearmed, or, as Meredith Parker (Kerry Butler) says early in Act 1, “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.” 

“Bat Boy,” which ran on off-Broadway for nearly a year in 2001, was a brilliant show that perfectly captured hopes and fears we were going through in the time of the (false) Y2K scare and the (tragically true) events of 9/11. Just as Edgar the Bat Boy himself represents a rare breed of individual, the play about him ranks alongside a more famous off-Broadway hit, 1982’s “Little Shop of Horrors,” as a sterling example of that unique form known as the horror/comedy/musical.

“Bat Boy: The Musical” was famously inspired by a supermarket tabloid headline circa 1982: “Bat Child Found in Cave.” The article was the usual hogwash — accentuated by a pre-photoshop, laughably phony-looking rendition of a young man a bat-like countenance — but it motivated writers Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming to start thinking about such a character and what kind of story they could tell about him.

“Bat Boy” is generally described as a “rock musical,” but that doesn’t do it justice. Mr. O’Keefe’s score includes only a few deliberately rockish numbers in its musical mix, like the opener “Hold Me Bat Boy.” The three young antagonists, the unsympathetic Taylor siblings (played by Andrew Durand, John-Michael Lyles, and Olivia Puckett), tell us their stories in a pre-Lin-Manuel Miranda Broadway approximation of rap and hip-hop. 

The sheriff (Tom McGowan) brings the Bat Boy (Taylor Trensch) to the home of 15-year-old Shelly Parker (Gabi Carrubba) and her mother (the marvelous Kerry Butler, who played the daughter in 2001) in an operetta-like sequence delivered in rhyming dialogue.

Mr. O’Keefe also provides a musical sting — illustrated by a flash of red light — whenever Edgar the Bat Boy succumbs to his atavistic, not to mention vampiric, urges. But the bulk of Mr. O’Keefe’s score is easily described as being in classic American musical theater style, with plenty of comedy and patter numbers as well as traditional love songs.

Mr. Trensch is remarkable as the titular Edgar. He conveys physicality, as Bat Boy is first shown walking on all fours and swinging around whatever there is to swing around in a cave; he’s almost a physical incarnation of a CGI character. 

Bat Boy’s transformation into the sophisticated Edgar, who looks and talks as if he just walked out of an Oscar Wilde drama, is a brilliant piece of stagecraft from director Alex Timbers enhanced greatly by Ms. Butler and Ms. Carrubba. As Edgar, Mr. Trensch gets his equivalent of the “I Want” song, “Let Me Walk Among You,” early in Act Two rather than at the beginning, and it’s both touching and hysterical. 

Mr. Timbers’s production is an excellent job, good enough to achieve the City Center dream of graduating to a larger run, even as its staging of “Ragtime” is currently doing so at the Vivian Beaumont.  

Mr. O’Keefe has revisited the score, adding more songs, and also expanding the orchestra — the new production sounds even better than the 2001 cast album or the 2004 London cast recording. Among other niceties, “Children, Children” a mock-pastoral ode to young and physical love is now a show-stopper belted by the formidable, large-and-in-charge Alex Newell.

Messrs. Farley, Flemming, and O’Keefe are to be commended for coming up with a show that succeeds both as campy parody and as a more straightforward morality play. Whenever it veers dangerously near to preachiness and woke-like values of love and acceptance, the entire tone then shifts into satirical mode.  

Then, too, it seems to end with conflicting messages. On one hand, we are told that Bat Boy’s tragedy (minor spoiler alert) was that he never quite accepted who he is, thus the moral is stated as: “Don’t deny your inner beast.” But at the same time, the chorus tells us, “Love your neighbor, keep your vows. / And do not rip the heads off of cows.”

Correction: Alex Timbers is the director of ‘Bat Boy.’ An earlier version misidentified the director.