Did Bat Boy Fly with London Drama Critics?
Here is a sampling of what they had to say:
Benedict Nightingale of The London Times: "Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming's tale of the feral title-character, discovered in a dank Virginia cave and restored to humankind, is ebullient stuff, sometimes fun and occasionally even funny. But it's also pretty sophomoric and almost willfully cluttered… Should I reveal that the ending is partly another parody, this time of Oedipus Rex? Perhaps not. But by then my objection wasn't to send-ups that would, I think, also include Lawrence O'Keefe's score, which offers everything from rock to gospel and seems jubilantly and sometimes tunefully indebted to Lloyd Webber and Boublil and Schonberg, among others. It was that Mark Wing-Davey, who directs, seems to want us to find May 's Bat Boy sweet and lovable and his fate poignant. 'I'm not some garden gnome,' he sings. 'I want to make this world my home.' Maybe we were meant to say 'ah!' to that. My reaction, I fear, was nearer 'yuk.'"
Fiona Mountford of The Evening Standard: "For a few minutes at the beginning of Mark Wing-Davey's hilarious production, when Bat Boy is hooded and bound Abu Ghraib-style and taken to the home of the local vet, it seems as though book writers Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming have a serious point to make about the acceptance of outsiders in closed American hearts and minds. Nothing of the sort: what they and lyricist Laurence O'Keefe choose to do instead is present Greystoke meets The Waltons via My Fair Lady, B-movie style… Deven May's impressive Bat Boy, all overbite and Spock ears, flourishes under the tutelage of all-American mom and vet's wife Meredith Parker excellent Rebecca Vere… Williams, the original Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, triumphs musically in a night of eclectic styles."
Michael Billington of The Guardian: "This is one of those campy off-Broadway shows that secretly delights in its own awfulness: the theatrical equivalent of a movie like Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Quite what it is doing on a West End stage, after a run at West Yorkshire Playhouse, is a mystery. At first, I thought we might be in for a satire on American society's capacity to demonise the outsider. But what we get is a musically undistinguished, lyrically trite rock-show, tricked out with vampirism, incest and gore. Even a self-consciously weird musical like this requires a certain internal logic: something lacking from Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming's book, Laurence O'Keefe's lyrics, or Mark Wing-Davey's production."
Andrew Clark and Ian Shuttleworth of The Financial Times: "This off-Broadway musical received, at best, politely baffled reviews on its June opening in Leeds. Its producers should have known better than to plonk it down in a 1,400-seat West End theatre, where even a noisy claque cannot disguise the failure of any attempt at subtlety or complexity. OK, forget subtlety, but there is complexity here - or at least muddle. Story writers Keythe Farley and Brian Flemming try to have their cake and eat it, or have their blood and drink it. The show aspires to be Rocky Horror-style high camp, as hokey small-town American values collide with the bizarre, but also tries to make the town of Hope Falls plausible enough for the script's message about the damage wreaked by prejudice and misunderstanding to seem trenchant rather than trite. Guess what? It fails. The earnest shadows give the camp a slimy taste in the mouth, so to speak. Eventually it gives up all attempts at seriousness and just flies over the top, but by then the damage is done. Nor are Laurence O'Keefe's songs memorable enough except for a rap number which you really wish was forgettable to counteract this. The music lacks a necessary parodic edge."