Hold me, Bat Boy…

…and hello again, Ottawa!

When I moved from Ontario to Alberta, almost a year ago, I took very little with me. The Big Purge was cathartic and difficult, and one of the hardest jobs to do was to pare down my collection of books.

I took several passes at it, slowly whittling away at shelves full of textbooks, reference books, scripts, scores, fiction, non-fiction, comic books and anything else that contained mass and might add to the cost of moving halfway across the country. At the end of it all, I was left with a small box of books I couldn't possibly part with: my Shakespeare folio, some voice books, and a very small collection of scripts. One of the scripts I couldn't part with was my copy of “Bat Boy: The Musical“.

It's hard to pin down the appeal of Bat Boy for me. When asked about it, I place it somewhere in the Little-Shop-Rocky-Horror-Sweeney-Todd spectrum of musical theatre. It's a committed love-child of classic musical theatre tropes and B horror movies that came out of the infamous Weekly World News tabloid story about a half-boy, half-bat found in a cave. It was a show that I always dreamed I'd get to produce; one that I'd vowed to do right; one that sat on my bookshelf in a perpetual state of “someday”.

In a way, “someday” arrived a few months ago when the prospect of coming back to Ottawa to be in a production of Bat Boy presented itself. When I found out about it, I turned immediately to my “current” Edmonton bookshelf and pulled the script out. It didn't take me long to decide to pursue the opportunity, and everything has worked out. It's a musical I've always loved; I've been asked to play a part I never saw myself performing; and on top of everything else, it's a chance to reconnect with Ottawa friends I haven't seen in almost a year.

I can't wait to get into rehearsal!

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