‘Bat Boy: The Musical’ is Fun But Unremarkable

Haley Brown ’14 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

Bat Boy: The Musical, presented by the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club and directed by Ally Kiley, ran from November 14th to November 23rd in 2014. The show is a fun, silly, horror-esque comedy taking place in the rural town of Hope Falls, West Virginia, where citizens are fond of peace, quiet, and healthy farm animals — and less fond of the blood-guzzling, half-bat half-boy living among them.

Bat Boy is discovered by three teenage spelunkers in the first scene, when the kids begin antagonizing him and one of them is bitten. Bat Boy is dragged out to the house of the town veterinarian, Dr. Parker, where Parker’s wife Meredith and daughter Shelley happily accept the new stray. With a little dedication and work, Bat Boy is speaking perfect English in no time at all. He is the picture of a charming citizen — except for his thirst for blood, which torments him enough to seek help from a faith healer at the town revival. But not everyone in Hope Falls is such a big fan of Bat Boy, and they — along with the jealous, scheming Dr. Parker — have other ideas.

One after another, Bat Boy is framed for the deaths of three town children. Soon enough the Parker women have a mob on their hands as they frantically search for their runaway family member. They plan their escape, and Shelley runs off alone after revealing to her mother that she wants to marry the Bat Boy. The two find each other again deep in the woods, where they encounter a strange mass orgy of woodland creatures led by the Greek god Pan. Shortly after consummating their love, Shelley and Bat Boy uncover a horrifying secret: they’re actually twins. The finale is brutal and bloody in an almost comically absurd twist of fate, and nobody gets a happy ending.

The lighting design in this show was fabulous, often using techniques like silhouetting and dramatic color changes to indicate a character’s flashback or dark state of mind. It accented the set design, which for a good portion of the show is simply a kitschy 1950s-esque pastel kitchen aesthetic. The music was upbeat and fun, even when a character was plotting dire things, and that disconnect made it even more fun. Aside from the opening number, which was too quiet and under-performed, all of the songs were well done and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.

Still, the play was mostly surface. While Bat Boy was a fun show, it ran a little long, exhausting the audience towards the end with lots of scene changes, flashback stories, and a very drawn-out ending. There’s no denying its plot to be a near-perfect replica of Edward Scissorhands, and its trite, trope-y themes and shock-value twists did not salvage a weak ending and storyline. While the acting was excellent, especially on the parts of the titular Bat Boy and the nefarious Dr. Parker, most of the characters fell flat. In the end, the story it told just didn’t feel meaningful or, towards the end, even very entertaining.