There was a raucous silence in the auditorium, a breathless air, and then \u2013 BOOM! The stage flashed red, and in the light, a grotesque thing: an evangelical\u2019s worst nightmare, a mutant heathen born for fear. A ragged boy with bat ears and a silverback gorilla\u2019s pose, leering at the crowd from behind his primal cage \u2013 and there, the crowning jewel of the creature\u2019s costume, a fitting reminder of another monster in America: \u201ckeep kids off drugs\u201d is displayed on his D.A.R.E. souvenir t-shirt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was the reveal of the eponymous protagonist in Bat Boy<\/em>, the mic-drop showcase of Austin Community College\u2019s musical theater upgrade. The production calls attention to the new programs within the drama department, like the now offered Associate of Arts in Musical Theatre and Associate of Arts in Costume Technology. It\u2019s a star-stunning debut, ornamented with persistent gags and mocking tropes so much that the whole spectacle plays like a hammer-to-the-knee reaction test \u2014 the more you restrain yourself, the more it pulls the glee out of you.\u00a0 The show\u2019s other notable features include:\u00a0 side-characters passing joints to stuffed animals, sardonic pow-wows against middle-aged maternally-bosomed women with a penchant for Confederate-culture eccentricities, and Guillermo-del-Toro-esque romances between strange mutants and innocent girls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s Theater of the Ridiculous,\u201d explains Jamie Rogers, ACC\u2019s drama and music director at the helm of Bat-Boy<\/em>, \u201cwhere actors treat the weird as normal as possible.\u201d His conception of the show was to flaunt the new facilities of the Drama Department at ACC\u2019s Highland campus, which culminated in the Black-Box theater. The department received a variety of equally important additions behind the scenes as well, such as: a new scene shop with state-of-the-art basal wood sawdust and metal hardware to which the sawdust basal wood can be fastened; five new acting studios for script-reading and workshop complete with yoga mats for movement and mindfulness training \u2013 as if the present memoirs of washed up actors weren\u2019t enough a reminder to maintain mindfulness; costume and set design labs equipped with drafting tables and Macbooks so that the college can further ensnare you in to their lair; and a greenroom in an upgraded backstage with outstanding stage monitors for actors to keep track of their cues. If my facetious descriptions don\u2019t do it justice, I assure you that the additions are extraordinary. Every room I visited with Rogers emitted a professional and modern aesthetic, so that at times I questioned whether I was still visiting ACC or a genuine theater studio. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But the Black-Box is the paramount result. The show\u2019s box-office and entrance are more pleasant additions to the professional flair of the new facilities, with the theater\u2019s look greeting guests like a soft-spoken lay \u2013 the only difference between the intimate setting for some Brooklynite one-act play is the lack of rat-infested ventilation weaving about the ceiling and moldy brick walls rampant with cracked mortar. <\/p>\n\n\n\n To Rogers, the theater serves as a wealth of possibilities for the future of ACC\u2019s Drama program. \u201cIt\u2019s really flexible \u2013 we can turn the stage into anything we want,\u201d he says. Though Bat Boy <\/em>didn\u2019t take advantage of this, the theater is more flexible than it lets on: the seats can be arranged in every which way \u2013 whether it be a Globe-Theater colosseum format where the seats encroach upon the stage in a circle, or a runway-style arena where the actors have a walkway indented into the crowd. The eventual goal of this, Rogers notes, is to \u201cmaybe not perform big shows like Rodgers and Hammerstein,\u201d but to allow malleability for future performances that can lead to unique experiences for the drama students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe that is the crux of it all. In a world with conflict woven into its seams, everything seems muddled and irresolute. Certainty threw itself out the window ages ago. With each day that moseys on, it seems we lose track of when and where we are, until the news brings us back to a new reality each year. You\u2019ll hear words like, \u201cNo, that war is over, now you need to care about this one,\u201d or, \u201cA.I. is already in the past, it\u2019s time to get ready for petroleum-based music formats, \u2026 they\u2019re the unprecedented future!\u201d And as a result, we resort to any means of unification as a way to distract ourselves from the hodgepodge of world affairs that lay piecemeal across time. And what better way to gain that unification than through art: the most universal medium across humanity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Rogers says that\u00a0 Bat Boy <\/em>alludes to an inexorable problem storming through American culture. The allusion is evident if you had a chance to attend the musical \u2013 most of the cast repudiates Bat-Boy and wishes for his ostracism, despite his comprehensive self-education and attention to social norms. He is by every definition a delightful young man in southern culture, but the pretense surrounding his upbringing hinders anyone in his community from cultivating acceptance. Instead, they beat around the bush and connive ways to ensure his exclusion from society. And what better way to compliment the scapegoatism than by wearing the D.A.R.E. t-shirt?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The future of musical theater at ACC seems to point towards culturally-aware programs with themes that conflate with modern society. When asked what his ideas for future musicals would be, Rogers stated his uncertainty, saying \u201cwhen we get closer to next season, everything can change, and that\u2019s when we\u2019ll be able to see what\u2019s going on in the world and what we can do to represent that.\u201d Even if no answer really came from the question, the uncertainty itself is more gratifying than any plan that could\u2019ve been posed. Any musical department could rely on tried-and-true shows, whether it be Cinderella<\/em> or Thoroughly Modern Millie<\/em> or what have you \u2013 but what if a department decided to choose unique selections based on the state of global affairs? Rather than seeing The Book of Mormon <\/em>over and over at the Butler Hall, what if we saw Bat-Boy, <\/em>a slightly obscure musical that resonates all too well in the world we live in? <\/p>\n\n\n\n Whether you\u2019re an actor, a stage technician, or a faithful audience errantist \u2013 consider looking into the future of ACC\u2019s drama program. For myself, Bat Boy<\/em> played out to be an experience like no other and not\u00a0 just\u00a0 because of the show; in fact, the impetus of my excitement for the performance lay in the mirth and din of the theater that night. Despite every trouble in the world \u2013 every parley, every conflict, every moral-forsaken insult on the grounds of political fervor \u2013 an audience was brought together under one roof, coalescing into a jovial uproar, and so much so that for a moment, Bat Boy actually felt like a distant fantasy instead of so grounded in reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n ACC unveils it’s new musical theatre department with a debut performance of Bat Boy: The Musical<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4103,"featured_media":8415,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4103"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/accent\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/157\/2024\/02\/image0.jpeg\")
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