You may laugh, or wince, but Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell was a seminal album for me. As a 10-year-old weaned on original Broadway cast recordings and ABBA (in that order), I found that songwriter Jim Steinman’s exuberant melodies and Todd Rundgren’s muscular, flamboyant, often soulful production—clearly inspired by Phil Spector’s wall of sound technique—reached me in ways that other album-oriented rock of the era, with the notable exception of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, didn’t. True, Meat Loaf’s corn-fed crooning offered no more nuance than that of most arena rockers, but singles like “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and especially the Spector homage “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night)” delivered a mix of wit, joy and, yes, theatricality that was, and is, impossible to resist, their unabashed bombast notwithstanding.
It was with a heavy heart, then, that I watched the sad, inevitable spectacle that is Bat Out of Hell—The Musical unfold, at a preview of its off-Broadway premiere. Already a hit in London—where despite the supposed national distaste for excess, West End audiences flock to bombastic jukebox musicals like bees to honeyed tea—the show features songs from the titular album, along with others Steinman crafted for subsequent Meat Loaf recordings (among them Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell), as well as tunes featured on Steinman’s own albums and made famous by other artists, with a couple of previously unreleased songs thrown in.
In an act of suitably epic hubris, Steinman also wrote the musical’s book, if you can call it that, a contrived, ham-fisted account of oppressed young love that hardly justifies a running time of two hours and 40 minutes (including, mercifully, an intermission). The setting is Obsidian, a city formed after some apocalyptic event causes Manhattan to split and drift out to sea. We meet Strat, the charismatic, guitar-wielding leader of The Lost, a group of mutants whose DNA has left them forever frozen at the age of 18—the same age, coincidentally, as Raven, daughter to the tyrannical, filthy rich police chief, Falco, who keeps her locked in an enormous tower.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★ review here.]
“I will decorate this city with ribbons of blood,” warns Falco, who in Bradley Dean’s gamely over-the-top performance metastasizes from an oily cad into a grotesque buffoon. Actually, it will be confetti, sporadically raining down on John Bausor’s multi-layered, neon-lit set—essentially a canvas for Finn Ross’s video design, which allows us to observe a drugged Raven, a bleeding Strat and various tiffs, tantrums and overheated interaction in larger-than-life dimensions.
Xena Gusthart, who adapted Emma Porter’s original choreography for this production, has Raven and other characters stumble about at points as if on muscle relaxants, in sharp contrast to the dancers who surround them, jerking and thrusting as if they wandered in out of an early MTV video session. During “Paradise,” led by Dean and Lena Hall—who at least gets to lend her vocal and comedic chops to the role of Sloane, Falco’s disgusted, dissolute wife and Raven’s devoted mom—a chorus line dressed to resemble identical moppets bop up and down as Dean and Hall writhe around in a glossy convertible that’s rolled on stage.
Like a lot of jukebox fare, Bat tries to have its camp and move us too, and Steinman and director Jay Scheib seem unable to decide which is their priority. At the performance I attended, audience members laughed nervously—I think—as one of Strat’s cohorts tore angrily into Raven’s room and started ripping apart a pillow, then again when Falco lashed out physically at his wife and daughter. More predictably, there were cheers for song lyrics cheekily dropped into the dialogue, and of course for the hits themselves—even if the latter are played mechanically, for the most part, and ploddingly, with an emphasis on volume.
The young leads perform serviceably nonetheless, Andrew Polec’s pining tenor and Christina Bennington’s sweetly potent pop soprano carrying chestnuts like “Making Love Out of Nothing At All” (a hit for Air Supply back in the day) and “I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That),” as well as the Celine Dion opus “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” (Dean and Hall also sing, loudly, on the latter two.)
Still, by the time I left the theater, I wanted nothing so much as to rip out my phone, plug in my earbuds and listen to the original Bat, to remember how charmed I was by that iteration. This one, I’m afraid, is a bit of a turkey.
