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.