I agree- I love this show, but I doubt a polish job would hurt it much. O'Keefe has learned his craft much better since then, working on a number of other somewhat campy cult musicals. There are a few songs in Bat Boy that just don't work, and this could fix the show and make it into the powerhouse it always felt like it almost could have been.
I hope they cut "Children, Children." The rest I hope they leave mostly intact. I've rarely laughed so hard at the theater than at BAT BOY. And the music is great too.
I don't think BAT BOY is a Broadway musical. The scale and scope of the show was perfectly at home in the intimacey of Off-Broadway. It could certainly benefit from some work but to try to inflate it to a Broadway-sized musical would, IMHO, be a mistake.
But it wasn't really in an intimate space Off-Broadway. The show ran at the Union Square Theatre which is 499 seats and has a rather large stage. There are Broadway houses which feel more intimate than that space, even if they do have more seats.
The rap was gone as of London, wasn't it? It was tied to such a specific place in time, when pissed-off rap metal from Rage Against the Machine to Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park ruled the airwaves that it seems even more anachronistic than anything else in the show now.
"Watcha Wanna Do" is a pretty banal parody of early, pre-peak Red Hot Chili Peppers, as well as of Zak De La Rocha and Fred Durst, who were iconic to the kind of angsty lower-class semi-suburban white kids that "Bat Boy" skewers in the Taylor family. Rage Against the Machine's legacy has held up much better than that of the other rap-metal stars, so the weirdly specific musical moment there has been replaced with a more generic but less dated and stilted number, "Hey, Freak" in the British version and presumably in the new revisal.
Funny, I loathe rap but found that material spot-on in BAT BOY. I always loved the end of the first act, "Comfort and Joy," but heard they were messin' with that. It's the song on the CD I'm most likely to play.
"I'm a comedian, but in my spare time, things bother me." Garry Shandling
I saw the original production 3 times. So I guess you can say I really enjoyed this show. One of those performances the cast was collecting for Broadway Cares and I handed Kaitlin Hopkins and Kerry Butler $20. You would have thought I handed them a million. They were so excited and handed me a window card signed by the entire cast. There was something about that moment that always makes me smile.
"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson