For Kerry Butler, This Is Not Your Mother's Bat Boy

Kerry Butler always knew she wanted to play Meredith Parker in Bat Boy. Now, nearly 25 years after originating the role of Shelley, Meredith’s daughter, in the original off-Broadway run, she’s revisiting the musical from a new perspective. “It’s very nostalgic,” Butler told Broadway.com. “It’s really been incredible, just thinking about my life back then and my life now.”

In 2001, Butler had three Broadway shows under her belt but had never originated a role. Since then, she’s built a career out of originating roles in musicals that have followed in the footsteps of Bat Boy: dark, funny, instant cult-classic musicals about teenagers. In Hairspray, Xanadu and Catch Me If You Can, Butler introduced a series of goofy, neurotic contemporary ingenues to the musical theater canon. But recently, she’s been making her mark on teenage cult musicals as a token adult. Right now, she’s on a break from playing Ms. Fleming, the hippie guidance counselor in Heathers The Musical for the two-week run of Bat Boy at New York City Center.

“Most of the time, the teen parts are the best parts,” Butler said. But Meredith in Bat Boy is an anomaly. “It’s like Mama Rose. It’s an incredible role to get to play." In the show, Meredith, along with her husband and daughter, adopts Edgar, a half-bat half-boy found in a cave. Meredith nurtures Edgar and tries to ingratiate him with their rural West Virginia community. But the town, already in search of a scapegoat for their economic hardship, has other plans.

10 years ago, director Alex Timbers asked Butler to play Meredith in a reading of Bat Boy. He’d always loved the musical, Butler said, and wanted to help writers Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming and composer Laurence O’Keefe revise and revitalize it. The reading didn’t go anywhere at the time, but the experience stuck with Butler. So when Timbers called again a month ago asking her to revisit the role, Butler didn’t need convincing. “I was like, ‘No question,’” she said. “There was no way I was not doing this.”

This Bat Boy isn’t the same production as when Butler first performed it. “So much is different,” she said. “Alex is treating it like a new show.” New songs have been added. Old songs have been cut. Diehard fans may hear different lyrics than they remember from the cast recording. Many of those changes have been in service of deepening the musical’s political resonance. “It definitely feels like I’m working on a new show, in a way,” Butler said. But she’s also a new person.

The first time around, Butler admits, she didn't understand the musical’s tagline: Don’t deny your beast inside. “I was almost embarrassed by that. Now it hits me. It’s so much more relevant,” she explained. "It means not always blaming the other person, not always scapegoating people. Look inside yourself. We all have potential to be really good and to be really evil.”

During the original run, as Butler heard songs satirizing the hypocrisy of purported “Christian charity” night after night, she was going to born-again churches. Later, when she found out how many of those churches felt about the LGBTQ+ community, Butler left and joined a progressive congregation with a gay pastor. “My passion is definitely welcoming people,” she said. “I think that’s what this story is too.”

Throughout the rehearsal process, she’s thought a lot about Kaitlyn Hopkins’ Meredith. “She’s definitely in my head as a prototype because I thought she was genius. But again, it always has to come from yourself.”

Now that she’s made it from the rehearsal room to the stage, Butler is relishing the walk down memory lane. She’s sharing a dressing room with Marissa Jaret Winokur, who played her best friend in Hairspray and became her best friend offstage. She celebrated her first performance with most of her castmates from the original off-Broadway company in the audience.

With Gabi Carrubba as Shelley, Butler feels like she’s in a different musical. “Her part, specifically, is very different from how I played it, just in the writing,” Butler said. “Gabi is doing an amazing job making it her own.” And as for Butler's Meredith? “I haven’t been able to play a role like this in a long time. I love it more now than I did before.”

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