Right after Killing Time (the BW version), Patrick and his co-worker Tim Price leave whatever club their currently snorting cocaine off of toilets and find themselves on a train track (the club I think was built on or around the tracks, which was in the book). Tim has a meltdown and disappears. A few scenes later (or perhaps directly after, not certain), Patrick is seen killing a homeless man in a large overcoat.
This is where the preview and freezed show differ. In the version that closed, this was just a random homeless man also played by the Kimball actor in a double casting (like Alice Ripley's three roles). In the previews, it was closer to the book in both what actually happened and what is implied: the homeless man IS Tim Price. Not just played by the same actor.
But it's not as simple as that either, which is where it gets complicated and significantly alters the course of the plot (or at least Patrick Bateman's overall sanity). Patrick recognizes the homeless man as Tim Price, stabs him anyway. Act One passes by, and "December slips into January, which mutates into February," and Tim Price is still missing (though his friends other than Patrick are only vaguely aware and mention it in passing), but then Tim apparently invites Patrick and Evelyn, his girlfriend, to his house in the Hamptons (or maybe Evelyn has the key because they're having an affair, which is intentionally unclear). He doesn't show up during this Hamptons sequence, but the audience is supposed to be thinking "Patrick killed this guy and they don't know it".
But then when he gets back and eventually makes his phone call to his lawyer, he is in his office and in walks Tim Price himself! He's been off gallivanting, and Patrick is flabbergasted. Did he dream killing Price, or did Price survive and knows Patrick is killing people? If it was really Price, why was he homeless? Is it an indictment of the lecherous capitalist system that pauperizes those brave enough to leave it? Or is there something else going on?
This whole subplot ends with Tim Price singing the harrowing "Don't You Want Me" amongst a pack of aggressive NY dancers and some of his victims, in another nameless club to Patrick's mental breakdown, as if in a taunt. This comes directly after it is revealed by Detective Kimball that he DEFINITELY saw Paul Owen (who Patrick brutally murdered to Huey Lewis and the News in his apartment) in London alive and well.
Personally I think that the change to a random homeless man eliminates an entire layer of existential meaning from the work, and it also deviates further from the novel. In the novel you're actually not quite sure if, since the book opens with Tim Price staring up at the "ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE" sign, that it's not an elaborate daydream and Tim is his alter ego, or perhaps Tim is going through the EXACT same mental breakdown Patrick is because the book spends so much time making sure we know EVERYONE is exactly alike in all things even though they try to be different, or if Tim got out of the cyclical rut and he rejoins the main characters only after he has been metaphorically "killed" by Patrick and...
There's just a lot of meaning that is totally erased there and I'm disappointed they didn't keep it in, as it would have made the book of the musical that much tighter and its themes more... pronounced, if not totally clear since the whole show is an existential fever dream to begin with.
