“Poor little person with eyes so sad, where in the dark did they hide you?” sings the actress Kerry Butler as she plays Meredith Parker, a mother rescuing a half-monster, half-child who’s been found in a nearby cave. “Poor little creature, it makes me mad, to think of the childhood denied you.”

Butler stars in the rock musical "Bat Boy," currently scorching through a two-week run at New York City Center. At once endearing, alienating and hilarious, Butler croons sweetly to the show’s titular long-toothed child, who huddles in a cage in her living room.

Her hopeful lament might as easily be sung for the show itself. "Bat Boy" hasn’t been performed on a professional stage in New York City in more than 20 years. A promising 2001 off-Broadway run was cut short after Sept. 11, and despite a cult following, subsequent American productions have been limited mostly to college and high school stages. Now it’s back, teeth freshly polished, in a star-stuffed iteration that’s been thoroughly rewritten, with five new songs to boot.

This is the stuff theater kid dreams are made of.

I first saw "Bat Boy" in one of those aforementioned productions when I was an undergrad, and I was thrilled by how insane — and yet relatable — it was. Bat Boy himself was an outsider whose differences were no fault of his own, and he fought hard to fit into his little, provincial town. Despite his vampiric tendencies, I rooted for him. The same was true of the musical itself. Would I ever see such a freak show on a big stage?

Well, I did last week, and it was an utter joy. The new songs are poppy and catchy, the storyline is smoother, and yet it can still startle the uninitiated. I heard gasps of “Oh, my God” all around me, several times, during the show’s unhinged second act.

This fall we’re witnessing an onslaught of musical revivals with a fresh strategy—they’ve taken old, imperfect treasures and ripped up their scripts.

There’s the long-anticipated return of the musical "Chess," which features pop tunes by ABBA musicians Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus. In Washington, D.C., a totally rewritten version of "Damn Yankees" is building buzz for a Broadway transfer. And Andrew Lloyd Webber’s "Phantom of the Opera" has been sliced, diced, rearranged and even arrayed across multiple floors in an immersive production called "Masquerade."

This trend comes at a turning point for Broadway. The arithmetic for developing and staging an entirely new musical has become almost impossible, typically costing many years of work and a capitalization of $20 million or more because of skyrocketing expenses. (A play can require half that.) That’s a significant financial risk few can withstand. Last season alone saw the shuttering of "Real Women Have Curves," "Boop!," "A Wonderful World," "Smash," "Tammy Faye" and "Redwood." Of the 18 musicals that opened in the period, none have recouped their investments.

Rather than taking a gamble on completely new works, producers are searching for familiar titles with built-in audiences that can be made new again.

A boy that couldn’t fly

"Bat Boy" first sank its fangs into New York in March 2001, opening at the Union Square Theatre to rave reviews and an immediate cult following. Inspired by an infamous (and, yes, made-up) Weekly World News article about a half-boy, half-bat, book writers Brian Fleming and Keythe Farley and composer-lyricist Laurence O’Keefe penned a gruesome rock ’n’ roll morality fable that slathered on the shock as if making a bloody cake, layer by layer.

In the show, the feral child is quickly taught the mannerisms of humans and blossoms into a wise and charming teen — with a mind and love life all his own. But the world around him isn’t ready to accept this creepy, cravat-wearing wunderkind, and forces beyond his control push his small town toward violence.

"Bat Boy" caught on quickly with the downtown audiences that were thrilled by other shows of the era, including "Rent," "De La Guarda" and "Avenue Q." In a full-circle moment, Butler also starred in that production, as Meredith’s daughter, Shelley Parker. She remembers the electricity around it. “We thought we were going to Broadway,” Butler says. “We were selling out all the time. There was so much momentum behind us.”

And then Sept. 11 happened. The production briefly soldiered on, offering free performances for grateful first responders, but Lower Manhattan was no place for such a musical that fall. The show closed in December.

For the show’s writers, though, the story didn’t end there. “We always felt this was an ongoing thing, and we weren’t going to be satisfied until it was as perfect as it could be,” says O’Keefe, the composer. They used the college performances like the one I saw as laboratories to try new material, and they continued writing for the next two decades. “The cliché is ‘Broadway shows are never finished, they’re just abandoned.’ We never wanted to abandon it.”

Indeed, the conventional wisdom is that once a show is brought to Broadway, it doesn’t change much down the line. The script from that production is usually the one licensed out, and if the creators don’t wish to see changes (or if they die, and the work goes into the hands of a strict estate), then what you saw on opening night is gospel. But theatrical creatives are lately questioning that wisdom.

And so "Bat Boy" has landed again in New York with a promising new stew of ingredients. Tony-winning director Alex Timbers ("Moulin Rouge!," "American Utopia") has assembled a creative team and cast including Butler, Christopher Sieber, Alex Newell and Taylor Trensch. Staged as City Center’s Gala performance, the physical production has been thrown together over the course of 10 days.

If it catches on with audiences and potential producers, it has a possible future on Broadway — following recent City Center transfers including "Into the Woods," "Ragtime," "Once Upon a Mattress" and the Tony-winning "Parade."

New scripts and new formats

Several of Lloyd Webber’s musicals have lately been revamped, including "Sunset Boulevard," which received a 2025 Tony for its stark, stripped-down version of the 1995 original. There was also a rock-concert-like version of Evita in London and a ballroom-centric production, "Cats: The Jellicle Ball," headed to Broadway in April. In all three of these, the root book and songs have remained largely intact.

But in September, Lloyd Webber’s most famous work, "The Phantom of the Opera," was wildly reimagined as "Masquerade." Small groups of masked audience members are led through a gloomy, labyrinthine, multifloor set (formerly an art store on 57th Street) as actors scheme and sing around them. It’s a triumph of ingenuity, with six Phantoms and six Christines performing a night as the ensemble races among groups of guests who’ve been admitted in shifts.

“After the pandemic, Andrew Lloyd Webber saw that 'Phantom' might close, and then he just felt there was more possible story to be shared,” says Randy Weiner, a producer of immersive theater such as "Sleep No More" and "Queen of the Night." He conceived "Masquerade" with his wife, the director Diane Paulus, after being tapped by Webber three years ago. Meanwhile, "Phantom," the longest-running musical on Broadway, at a whopping 35 years, did close in 2023.

“Every second of those three years was like mayhem,” Weiner says. They had to wire an entire building for lighting and sound like a theater, and figure out how to move the multiple audiences and actors through the space without running into one another. “We literally hired a math major from Columbia to help us figure out all the shifts of characters and locations,” Weiner says. Plus they rewrote scenes, reordered events, eliminated songs and introduced a tune from the 2004 movie version.

When I attended in September, as actors sang and danced around us in the first scene, I wondered how my fellow audience members would take to this radical new look. I took a moment to look around and realized everyone was singing along. Including me. We already knew every word, and we were swept up in the new magic.

Can 'Chess' finally find its checkmate?

“As a director, I think it’s always fun to take a classic work and rethink it. It can reveal so many things about the world we’re in now and as opposed to the world when it was originally created,” says Michael Mayer, director of the musical "Chess," which opens at Broadway’s Imperial Theatre on Nov. 16. “Still, it is the rare musical that needs to be rewritten or needs new songs. And if you’re lucky enough, the original songwriters are around and are inspired to do it.”

Among theater aficionados, "Chess" is a famously flawed but promising show. Set during the Cold War and centered on a pair of grand masters from Russia and the U.S. (yes, it’s actually about chess), the show features a score by ABBA’s Andersson and Ulvaeus, with a book and lyrics by Tim Rice ("Evita," "The Lion King"). If you’ve read this far into an article about the nuances of rewriting musicals, you probably know that the 1984 pop hit "One Night in Bangkok" is from "Chess." But if you didn’t, I’m telling you now: The show is full of absolute anthems.

The original London production was a smash and ran from 1986 to ’89. But when it transferred to New York in 1988, the show sagged under the murky and overly complex plot. (Again, it’s about chess.) It closed after fewer than 100 performances and hasn’t been produced as a full Broadway show since.

Ten years ago, Emmy-winning screenwriter Danny Strong ("Recount," "Game Change") and Mayer teamed up to attempt a major overhaul — the banger songs were too promising to leave abandoned. Strong flew to London and got Rice on board; it turned out the lyricist loved his show enough to let it be changed. “He was totally aware of the issues,” Strong says. “One of the first things he said to me was, ‘When we wrote this, it was in the middle of the Cold War. We didn’t have perspective on it.’”

Strong envisioned a narrator who could explain major world events so they made sense to a contemporary audience. He also wanted a clearer version of the love triangle among the two chess players and their love interest. With the blessing of the ABBA duo, Strong also cut songs and rewrote almost every spoken scene.

The current Broadway cast is led by Aaron Tveit, Lea Michele and Nicholas Christopher, who also lent their thoughts to character creation. And, of course, the original trio of writers had notes. Mayer recalls a moment during the first rehearsal with the orchestra, called a "sitzprobe," where Andersson sat down at a piano to rework the ending of a song. “It was like he was a magnet and everyone in that room sort of just started walking toward his keyboard,” Mayer says. “What noise is his hand going to make? What chord are we going to get?”

The musical as a living document

Having the original writers around to tinker with a script is the exception rather than the rule. Ryan Donovan, an assistant professor of theater studies at Duke University, points to the exciting and renewed production of the 1955 musical "Damn Yankees" currently ending its run at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.

“None of the creators of 'Damn Yankees' are still around, but the show as written in the 1950s would no longer play as well. The gender politics are so out of date, the racial politics are so outdated, and it just wouldn’t speak to audiences in the way that the best musicals do,” Donovan says. “So the estates have been open to letting that show be revised.” The story of a Faustian bargain over baseball, rewritten by playwrights Will Power and Doug Wright (who won the Pulitzer Prize for his "I Am My Own Wife"), is now about the Baltimore Orioles in the 2000s and includes a plotline about performance-enhancing drugs.

Shows have always evolved, according to Donovan. “While he was still alive, Arthur Laurents, who wrote the libretto for "Gypsy" and directed three of the Broadway revivals, would take scissors to his own work,” he says. “If you go to Laurents’ archives at the Library of Congress, there are different versions of the script there. There’s the version he did with Angela Lansbury in the ’70s. Then there’s the script for Tyne Daly in the late ’80s, and then the script for the Patti LuPone production.”

The 2007 LuPone version started at City Center as part of the nonprofit theater’s “Encores” program, which resurrects rarely produced musicals for brief runs with casts who are given only a couple of weeks’ worth of rehearsal time. The point is to introduce new audiences to lesser-known work, satisfy fans with long memories and showcase the broad art of musical theater.

“City Center has two rabid fan bases,” says Jenny Gersten, the theater’s vice president and artistic director of musicals. “One is a fan base that loves classic musicals. And one is a fan base that is the under-35 set that is now discovering musical theater through all the different channels where they can consume it, like social media.”

"Bat Boy," with a young, outsider hero who’s rejected for not fitting in, should appeal to the younger set, Gersten says. “What I hope is that the older generation of musical theater lovers come to City Center and discover that they love 'Bat Boy' too.”

And if this is the last iteration of the show, and it doesn’t ever make it to Broadway, the creators say they’ll be happy. “I’m having a wonderful time right now just working with these actors, trying to be in the moment,” O’Keefe says. “That’s one of the lessons of the show itself, which is to notice, respect and love the people around you. So if there is no tomorrow, I don’t care. I’m having a great time now.”

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