The Little Musical that Didn't Suck: Bat Boy at DCAC
It’s been proven again and again: Art thrives on restriction. And kitschy art demands it the way even the most genteel of man-bat hybrids demand hot, fresh blood. So it’s no surprise that the best thing about Landless Theatre Company’s current revival of Bat Boy: The Musical is its audacious modesty.
That’s not an oxymoron: Their production is low-budget, low-tech, low-brow, and high camp. One wishes it was a bit more high-efficiency: No show based on a character, er, public figure, whose existence was reported by that venerable beacon of journalistic verisimilitude, the Weekly World News, has any business dragging on past the two-hour mark. But with a show, and a company, as eager-to-please as this is, it seems uncouth somehow to complain about them hanging around too long.
You already know the story: Freak discovered, freak feared by hicks, freak embraced by kindhearted Diane Weist-type, freak tries — oh, how he tries! — to assimilate. As Bat Boy burrows (and sometimes bites) his way into their hearts, the people of this unnamed West Virgina town experience their moral awakening in song: “We beat him like a gong / We kicked him repeatedly / But that was wrong!” Keythe Farley and Brian Fleming’s story deftly manages to work as a parody of musicals in general — and the gaseous bathos of Andew Lloyd Webber in particular — while still being dramatically satisfying in its own right.
The actors are, for the most part, marvelous. As the titular cave-dwelling bloodsucker, D.C. newcomer Matt Macis is a genuine find. He handles the role’s voracious demands for physicality, menace, and sympathy literally without breaking a sweat, which is itself kind of creepy given how much he has to jump around. And he can sing, too! Initially a feral recluse with a set of pointy ears that would give Mr. Spock an inferiority complex, he spends most of the show’s first half-hour on all fours or locked in a cage; later, he's given a suit and a set of BBC language tapes that teach him to speak exactly — no, I mean exactly — like Stewie from “Family Guy.”
As the surrogate mom who takes Bat Boy in and cleans him up, Esther Covington once again demonstrates her mad comedic skills; she plays it straight, with funnier results than the couple of cast members who can’t keep themselves from winking. Aaron Reeder is another standout, occupying several roles of various, ages and genders. Double-and-triple-casting abounds; the abrupt character switches that occasionally require an actor to rise from the dead before our eyes and put on, or take off, a wig or a pair of glasses are a big part of the show’s goofy charm.
What else? The four-piece band that scores the entire show wears awesome cow costumes. And let it be known that Avenue Q has not quite cornered the sadly underserved market on puppet sex. What do you want from an evening of respectable theater, anyway?
Bat Boy: The Musical is at DCAC through October 13. Tickets are available here.