Going Batty: My First Musical

Here begins another series on my latest show!

At the end of last semester I found out I'd been cast in my school's production of "Bat Boy: The Musical".  As this entry's title states, this is my first musical production!  It's nothing like the mainstream musicals I aspire to perform in ("Phantom of the Opera", "Wicked", to name a few), and in my research I've found the quote "a giggling cult hit" used most often to describe this show.  For the West End production (London's equivalent of Broadway) a reviewer said that "Bat Boy" was "a mad showbiz buff chucking Dracula, The Elephant Man, Phantom of the Opera, Pygmalion into a theatrical blender, adding bits of Frankenstein and The Lion King as after thoughts."  Doesn't that make you curious to see it? ;-)

 

As evidenced by this picture I took of the cast list, some of us were quite excited to be a part of the show!  I'm already very familiar with several people in the cast; some are from last semester's "Accidental Death of An Anarchist" and others I know from acting class or Barnstormers.  A few go to our sister campus at Essex.  It's a large cast, and at our first read-through last Wednesday we had a great time together.

I spent a few hours today researching the pop culture surrounding Bat Boy (the musical is based on the fictitious character created by World Weekly News in 1992), as well as the show's production history and facts about West Virginia (where the musical takes place).  I'll move on to research for my specific characters next.  As you can see, I'm double cast as two minor characters.  I had to swallow some disappointment because my lines in the text are few.  However, there are several big musical numbers in the show in which characters used are not specified, and Carl told me to learn them all because he'll probably be using me. :-)

We start Monday through Friday rehearsals this coming week.