The Columbia College Chicago Theatre Department‘s 2022-23 Mainstage Season continues with Bat Boy: The Musical, by Keythe Farley, Brian Flemming, and Laurence O’Keefe. The production, featuring an all-student cast and a production team composed of students, alumni, and faculty, runs December 1 through 10 in the Courtyard Theatre of the Getz Theatre Center of Columbia College, located at 72 E. 11th St. in Chicago’s South Loop. Student discounts are available. For tickets and more information (including COVID-19 protocols for this LIVE, IN-PERSON production), click here.

The production is directed by Columbia College alum and Theatre Department faculty member Stephanie Shaw ’92 (Theatre), MFA ’09 (Creative Writing), with music direction by Theatre Department faculty member Andra Velis Simon and choreography by Theatre Department faculty member Tommy Rivera-Vega.

The 1997 show, which had a successful Off-Broadway run in 2001, was inspired by a 1992 article in the supermarket tabloid Weekly World News. The musical concerns a teenage mutant—half human, half bat—discovered in a West Virginia cave by local spelunkers. Edgar, as the pointy-eared bloodthirsty boy is dubbed, is taken in by a local veterinarian, whose wife and daughter take an unlikely liking to the boy and try to humanize him. The result is a macabre musical comedy with bite.