Rocca’s performance of the resulting song, “The Cutting Room Floor,” afforded “a genuinely heartfelt moment.”

“The audience was sort of stunned,” O’Keefe says.

Ripped from the Tabloids

Keythe Farely and Brian Flemming, two colleagues from the Actors’ Gang, inspired Bat Boy when they showed O’Keefe a tabloid about an escaped bat creature.

The bat’s gripping tale and his superlatively ugly face instantly captivated O’Keefe, and he agreed to sign onto the project.

In the show, veterinarian Dr. Parker adopts Bat Boy, who matures into a well-behaved young man and falls in love with Parker’s daughter.

But after some strange occurrences—like the appearance of blood-drained cows—Bat Boy’s neighbors grow suspicious of him and try to stop him from fitting in and finding love.

Lyricist, collaborator and wife Nell Benjamin ’93 recalls when O’Keefe first showed her the script for Bat Boy.

“It didn’t have songs yet but he said ‘this is going to be a musical,’ and I thought he was crazy,” she says.

When Bat Boy arrived in New York, the New York Post called it an “instant classic.”

USA Today named it one of the top ten musicals of 2001, citing an “incredibly imaginative and clever book and a soaring score.”

“The last line of the show, ‘Don’t deny your beast inside,’ in addition to being a supremely ungrammatical phrase, has served as our theme,” O’Keefe says. “All the characters have some deep inner drive, pain or hunger, lust…Those characters that could recognize their inner drive, that could accept it, succeed, and everyone else who denies it dies, or something like that.”

This Bat has Flown

O’Keefe is busy these days with many new projects, but says he remains excited about Bat Boy’s impending arrival in London.

He will again collaborate with TheatreWorks/USA, which produced Sarah: Plain and Tall, for which he wrote the score and Benjamin the lyrics.