Transcript
A (0:00)
If your eyes are the windows to your soul and your glasses are the windows to your eyes, then it's pretty important to find your perfect frames. That's why at Warby Parker, we've made shopping for eyewear as easy and fun as can be. Peruse endless styles in our stores or use our app to virtually try on frames and get personalized recommendations. To find your next favorite pair of glasses, sunglasses or contact lenses, or to locate your nearest Warby Parker store hook, head over to warbyparker.com that's warbyparker.com grief doesn't keep a calendar. Anxiety doesn't clock out after five. Depression doesn't care if it's your busy season, but support can still fit into your life. With Grow, you can find a therapist who meets you where you are. They connect you with thousands of independent licensed therapists across the US offering both virtual and in person sessions. You can search by insurance provider, specialty treatment methods and more to find a therapist who works for you. And if it's not the right fit, switching is easy. There are no subscriptions, no long term commitments. You just pay per session. Find therapy on your time, evenings, weekends and Cancel up to 24 hours in advance at no cost. Whatever challenges you're facing, GrowTherapy is here to help. Sessions average about $21 with insurance and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. Visit growththerapy.com acast today to get started. That's growththerapy.growtherapy.com acast availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.
B (1:39)
Hear that? It's holiday cheer Arriving at Ulta Beauty with gifts for everyone on your list. Treat them to fan favorite gift sets from Charlotte, Tilbury and Peach and Lily. Go all out with timeless fragrances from ysl, Ariana Grande and Carolina Herrera. And you can never go wrong with an Ulta Beauty gift card. Head to Ulta Beauty for gifts that make the holidays brighter and even more beautiful. Ulta Beauty gifting happens here. Now I realize when addressing an audience of well educated musical theatre fans such as yourselves. I am most likely extraordinarily late to this particular party, but it has recently come to my attention. Hold me Bat Boy. Save me Bat Boy. Transfer Bat Boy because I am thirsty for its Broadway blood. I just saw this show for the very first time at New York's City Center Encores and I am obsessed. Oh my God. Hey, welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Or hello to those of you listening to this on podcast platforms. My name is Mickey Jo and I am obsessed with all things theatre. You currently find me on location here in New York where I am visiting as a professional theatre critic in order to cover as many new openings and arrivals as possible over the next couple of weeks. Now the reason we have come in November is to coincide with the official Broadway opening night of the originally British new musical Two Strangers Carrier Cake across New York that is happening right at the end of our trip. The reason for the beginning of our trip being when it is was to see Bat Boy at New York City Centre. This show representing the venue's annual gala presentation as well as I believe the first of a new season from new Artistic director Jenny Gersten. And what an incredibly strong and exciting start it is. If you don't know, City Centre is not a Broadway house, but they do produce a handful of musicals staged pretty much in concert, semi staged throughout the year. Some of these are encores presentations resurrecting shows from the past, not unlike Batboy, which became a cult hit musical when it first premiered in the very early 2000s. Several of these productions have gone on to transfer to Broadway, even becoming long running multi Tony award winning hits such as the long running production of Chicago subsequently seen around the world that originated as a semi staged sleek encores presentation of the show back in the 90s. More recently the likes of Once Upon a Mattress and Parade starring Ben Platt and Michaela Diamond. Also the starry into the woods rev. Whole bunch of shows have come out of City center and my hope is that Batboy gets the same Broadway transfer treatment because as I'm going to tell you in this full review, this production was sensational. It packed something of a bite as well as being side splittingly funny, perhaps I should say blood drawingly funny and you know, just utterly maniacal as well. This is a show that feels like it was written with the methodology of, you know what would be the single most bizarre and insane thing to happen to to this narrative in the next scene. I truly knew nothing beforehand about the direction this plot was going to take, nor any of the music. So much of it is now in my head. I'm going to tell you more about Batboy if you, like me, were not familiar with this show and I'm going to tell you why this version of it was so sensational. Of course, as well as sharing my theatrical thoughts with you today, as always, I would love to hear yours. Let me know what you thought of Batboy if you saw it at City center in the comments section down below or if you've seen a previous version of the show, even the original productions of the show. Please let me know about those as well. I am now desperate to find out more about this musical and if you enjoy listening to what I have to say and would like to hear more of my theater reviews, make sure to subscribe to my theatre themed YouTube channel or follow me on podcast platforms. Turn on notifications here as well so you don't miss any of my upcoming New York coverage. Plenty of Broadway and Off Broadway shows as well as vlog style content coming over the next few weeks. In the meantime though, there remains nothing for us to do but to talk about Bat Boy. So how to begin to explain explain what Batboy is? Well, its basis is it's pretty singular and quite interesting because the story is inspired by a weekly World News story from 1992 about the discovery of a sort of a half man, half bat creature discovered in a cave, which is also where the plot of the musical begins. Three local kids, sort of up to no good exploring a cave several miles to the south of the fictional town of Hope Falls, West Virginia, I believe, where the musical is set, discover an adolescent half boy, half bat creature in this cave who is then brought back to the town and entrusted to the local veterinarian and his family. Here's Dr. Parker, played in this production by Christopher Zieber. His wife is Meredith, played by Kerry Butler. Their daughter is Shelley. This is an interesting piece of casting because Kerry Butler played the role of Sherry in the original Off Broadway production and is now playing the generation above her mother, Meredith. Gabby Karuba, meanwhile, is this production Shelley and Taylor Trench is Bat Boy in a fabulous piece of casting, but we'll talk about the performances a little later. Now the family has a peculiar, if not unfamiliar, waspy kind of a dynamic. We come to find out that there is a lack of warmth and passion in the relationship between Meredith and Dr. Parker. She is also chastising her daughter for talking like a slut in her own words, when she is expressing enthusiasm about her boyfriend Rick or the guy who she hopes is going to be her boyfriend. Rick being one of the three siblings, siblings who together discovered Bat Boy, one of whom was bitten by him. And given the way that Meredith is characterized, very conservative, a little bit uptight. It's perhaps something of a surprise to us when she welcomes this Bat Boy creature into their home, admittedly to be kept in one of Dr. Parker's cages until he returns and can determine whether or not this is an animal or a human being and what rights it has. But by the end of the show, all will be revealed, and since I think people who haven't seen it beforehand deserve the experience, are getting to watch this plot unfold before their eyes with no sense of what's going to happen next and a complete sort of incredulity and bafflement. I am going to try and structure this review with a spoiler free section which you are currently listening to, and a spoiler inclusive section which I will flag ahead of time a little later on. What you need to know, without divulging too much information, is that as the plot continues, Batboy, who is dubbed Edgar by his new surrogate family, is taught to be a well behaved young gentleman, though that doesn't necessarily guarantee that he will be accepted in the local society. There's definitely shades of an Edward Scissorhands esque kind of a narrative at play here, and it's exactly that kind of show and that kind of tone exploring the behavior of society and the way they respond to this example of a newcomer, someone who is different, someone who is maybe perceived as a villain with fear mongering at play and some opportunism and all of these hypersaturated, over the top, almost John Water esque local personalities. It all pairs really, really well with a score written by Lawrence o', Keefe, whose work you are likely to know from the likes of Legally Blonde and Heathers, and he is particularly great at living in this very subversive, darkly comic, twisted place. The story and book are co written by Keith Farley and Brian Fleming and I have come to understand, having not known the show prior to this production, that there have been a great many updates and changes, a bunch of new songs actually written for this version of the show, as well as a decent amount of tweaks to lyrics here and there. This was also a very expanded production based on how the show would traditionally be cast. There would ordinarily be a lot more multi rolling, but this being, you know, the grand expansive stage of New York City center and a limited annual gala presentation for a couple of weeks, they had the scope to do something much more lavish and probably one of the biggest productions that Batboy is ever going to get. And even though this is like 25 years on and I think the new material I believe had been added for a prior production over the last few like maybe in conjunction with like a school production, sort of workshopped through that I guess before this big professional revelation. But there was no sense of stitches whatsoever in the material between the old and the new. It all felt incredibly Cohesive. And what a fantastic score it is. I mean, it hits you straight away with this brilliant theme, this Hold Me Bad boy that keeps coming back. It's sort of haunting and it captures in that and in this first number alone the intrigue and the mystery and the inherent weird romance of the story as well. That's such a big component of this, this quality of like indeterminate, intimate human connection between these characters that they aren't quite able to understand for themselves, but does the brilliant thing of taking this, this achingly romantic and dramatic melody and combining it with a tongue in cheek, twisted, odd and unusual lyric as they're singing all of these different echoes from Hold Me Bat Boy to like Save me Bat Boy. And then there's a moment where it goes into double time. I was convinced by the end of the opening number that this was going to actually be far more exciting than I had realized. It also does a great job of telling us so much about where this story is going to go by the beginning, because we get this sense of sort of a mob mentality already at in the way that it was staged in this production by Alex Timbers, director, contrasted by the lone figure of Shelley, who initially is the one singing that refrain. And there are a great many more killer songs as we go through the show, but in particular when we get to the second act, and this isn't too hefty a spoiler, we arrive at a song called Three Bedroom House, where for a handful of reasons, Meredith and Shelley are planning what the next step for them is going to look like. And they sing this excellent duet, which I realized as the lyric Three Bedroom House was emerging in the song, is one that I'd absolutely heard of before. Occasionally there are scores that have been around for a really long time that you've never had the chance to listen to, but you are aware of, like the name of a song that everyone loves from that show. Something like a Michael in the Bathroom from Be More Chill kind of a situation. And when they started singing this, I was like, oh, this is the one that I'm kind of vaguely aware of but had never heard before in my life. And what I love about 3 bedroom house, aside from the fact that I'm absolutely hooked on the melody and the way that it's. It builds and it's this compelling mother daughter duet, what I love is that it's one of those moments that I think if people were writing a musical now, they wouldn't necessarily musicalize because there is no huge justification. There's no huge requirement for there to be a song at this particular point in the story. And I feel so many musicals are being written now, particularly those being adapted from existing source material like films, where the craft now is becoming too personal. Put songs in the obvious dramatic moments and it's, you know, that's per all of the rules of musical theater. The whole, like, we sing when we can no longer speak, so when we rise to a certain emotional height, then a song would appear there. And the thing about Bat Boy is we are so often at that emotional height because the whole thing is so loaded and the stakes are quite often really very high and it gets so melodramatic and absolutely wild. But when Three Bedroom House happens, we've just come out of a really explosive scene and all the song needs to do is eventually engineer a heart to heart conversation between Shelley and Meredith, which is being for the most part delayed because the song is happening. It only comes in dialogue right towards the very end. And my point is, some of the most inspired musical theatre songs in history have come at unexpected moments when you wouldn't necessarily need for that song to exist there, but it does. And I think that's a useful thing for new musical theatre writers to go and revisit to look at some of those older scores and go, that's an iconic fixture of that score or that character singing that in that moment. It doesn't necessarily make sense, but it works. Anyway, my point is go listen to Three Bedroom House. It's an absolutely fantastic musical theater song. And unusually, because so many shows are the other way around, I would say that the second act of Batboy might even be stronger than the first. There's a lot of, like, figuring out what exactly it is that we are looking at. And this production and this direction by Alex Timbers, both because of the way the opening number is staged and then because of how strongly we get Meredith and Dr. Parker and Shelley's personalities in their first scene does a great job of bringing us right into where we need to be. But that second act, that's just riffing on everything and then eventually giving us this big plot twist of revelation and this culmination of a lot of things that have been foreshadowed and implied and equal parts shock value and satisfaction and just bizarre, unexpected backstory. That's when the show has really arrived at top speed and can enjoy its great here's how to stay alive longer so you can enjoy Boost Mobile's unlimited plan with a price that never goes up. Do not mistake a wasp nest for a pinata Stay alive and switch now at boost mobile. After 30 gigs, customers may experience slower speeds. Customers will pay $25 a month as long as they remain active on the Boost Mobile unlimited plan.