A Harvard student production of “Bat Boy” could be a key step on the long road to Broadway for the cult musical based on a creature that appeared in several Weekly World News stories.
The students contacted the show’s composer and lyricist, Harvard alum Laurence O’Keefe (class of ’91), and asked if he might visit rehearsal or offer a master class. He went them one better. O’Keefe and the other two creators of the 2001 off-Broadway show have long talked about tweaking it for the Great White Way. How about if they used the student production as their workshop?
“We were really excited about the opportunity,” says producer and Harvard senior Sam Moore, from Newburyport. “We said we’d be happy to do it.” Whatever nerves the students might have had evaporated after five minutes into the collaborative process, he says.
Performances begin Friday at Harvard’s Farkas Hall through Nov. 23.
Inspired by the character invented by the tabloid, “Bat Boy” follows the half-man, half-bat when he is taken from his West Virginia cave and tries to adjust to “normal” society, before a series of mysterious cattle deaths puts him under suspicion.
“We always felt there were places, especially in the first 30 minutes of the show, where the audience deserved better,” says O’Keefe. “They deserved a faster story that got to the point more.”
O’Keefe and book writers Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming came to Cambridge for a week in September, their travel and accommodations funded by the Office for the Arts at Harvard.
Without the pressure of a big-money producer standing outside their door tapping his foot impatiently, the experience was “wonderfully fertile, wonderfully helpful to us,” O’Keefe says. The three professionals watched rehearsals, stepped away to work, then presented the students a rewritten first act.
“The first 30 minutes is now 20 minutes,” O’Keefe says. The song “Dance With Me, Darling” has become “20 Feet Off the Floor,” which has substantially different words and melody and a faster tempo. O’Keefe and Flemming returned for another week’s work in October.
Jacob Rienstra stars as Bat Boy, with Tess Davison as Shelley and Jake Ohlbaum as Dr. Parker. Music director Cynthia Meng made the original connection with O’Keefe, and Tomi Adeyemi is the choreographer.
“We promised we would do no harm,” says O’Keefe, “so they would have a complete show that made sense and would do well, but is actually an improvement over earlier drafts.”
“To have a group of eager actors who are willing to try anything is really great for us,” says Farley. “I don’t think [the revision is] done, but we’re definitely making moves in the right direction.”
The show premiered at the Actors’ Gang Theatre in Los Angeles on Halloween 1997, and opened off-Broadway in March 2001. It won Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle awards, but closed in December that year, its run perhaps cut short by 9/11.
“Broadway was not out of the question when we did it in 2001,” O’Keefe said. “A lot of people felt like it was a show that didn’t get its chance, because of world events. I don’t know, maybe.”
“Bat Boy” has had a lively afterlife, though, including a SpeakEasy Stage Company production in Boston that won the 2003 Elliot Norton Award for best musical and “hundreds” of regional and student productions, says O’Keefe.
Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s been talk about a Broadway or Hollywood version ever since. The creators have been talking seriously about it for a few years, O’Keefe says. But since he’s in New York, Farley in California, and Flemming in Montana, they’ve never gotten it done. Harvard offered the perfect opportunity. Among those interested in bringing “Bat Boy” to Broadway are some of the original producers from 2001, who may see the student show, O’Keefe says.
Either way, it’s been good for the students, says director and Harvard senior Ally Kiley, especially for students like her and Moore who hope for careers in theater.
“Picking their brains has been really awesome,” says Kiley. “Also you learn to let go, which is a very important thing, especially in theater, because sometimes you do something one way and it goes fine, but there’s a better way of doing it.”
The experience is unusual, but not unprecedented.
“It’s a completely unoriginal idea, because it happened to me when I was at Harvard,” O’Keefe says, disclaiming credit. “We did a production of ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ my senior year, and the director was in contact with George Furth, who was the book writer.” They asked Furth to visit. Instead he asked them to serve as guinea pigs for revisions he was making for a London production.
“It was an amazing, eye-opening experience,” O’Keefe says. “I learned a ton, I fell in love with the process, and it may be one of the main reasons I became a writer.”
Joel Brown can be reached at jbnbpt@
gmail.com.