I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday…
It was a gentle autumn afternoon early in my senior year at Bishop Walsh High in Cumberland, Maryland, and, as newly elected senior class president, I was on some student council business with treasurer and good friend Karen Irwin. After we finished all our official errands, we stopped for a quick McDonald’s snack. As we sipped our sodas on the way home, Karen wanted to play me this new song. She popped in a cassette tape and skipped to track 6, and I heard the now immortal introductory strains of the Stratocaster on a song called “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” for the first time. In a single listen, I was taken on an 8 ½ minute journey that opened my young mind (I was barely 17, but I was totally dressed, Catholic school and all) and changed my ideas of what rock and roll could be. This singular work of art was not just a song, but a masterpiece of composition and execution. More accurately, it’s a mini-rock opera in just under nine minutes and four acts.
It was so amazing that we pulled off to the parking lot of LaVale Plaza and Karen guided me through the rest of my initiation to Bat Out of Hell by an at the time unknown to me artist going by the unlikely moniker Meat Loaf. None of the following tracks surpassed “Paradise”, but they were all uniquely wonderful. Not only catchy tunes with great hooks, but all with smart to downright poetic lyrics–some profound, some funny–but all told with a sly wink to the listener. Almost every song was like a masterfully crafted comic’s joke, starting with a set up (the best being the spoken word unforgettable “wolf with the red roses” intro to “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth”), followed by a story, and ending with a punchline (as in the same song, “You took the words right out of my mouth/It must have been when you were kissing me” and the sublime ending to “Paradise” which brings the song full circle). There are story songs, like my personal favorite, Jeannie C. Riley’s “The Harper Valley P.T.A.”. And then there are musical epics like these, where, in extending this Harper Valley universe metaphor, Mrs. Johnson not only addresses the meeting and confronts the busybody P.T.A members who have passed judgment on her, but makes a checklist to get even with every one of her persecutors using their individual vices against them, then burns the entire offensive school building to the ground and sips a cocktail on the hill overlooking the ashes. In 8 ½ minutes.
It was long ago and it was far away, and it was so much better than it is today…
Fast forward to now, where, a certain number of years later, I still stand by my youthful assertion that Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell is the single best rock and roll album ever recorded (in my corner is the fact that, according to Billboard, it’s the fifth best selling album of all time, going 14x platinum with over $43 million in sales, behind mainstream top 40 behemoths Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the Eagles’ Greatest Hits, AC/AD’s Back in Black, and Whitney Houston’s The Body Guard). When I looked over this season’s offering at the Hippodrome Theatre, in a year of many acclaimed and exciting shows, one in particular caught my attention: this month’s one night only performance of Jim Steinman’s Bat Out of Hell, the Musical. Sadly, last week I received word the performance had been canceled. Searching the musical’s website, it appeared the remainder of the tour had been scrapped and one extra show added at its final performance in Philadelphia. Having missed this twice, I decided to see what may very well be the last incarnation of this musical that continues to escape me.
I had heard of the show during it’s much anticipated 2019 off-Broadway try-out that sadly failed to transfer. But the roots of the show go back much earlier. Way back in 1968, as a student at Amherst, young Jim Steinman wrote the book, music, and lyrics for The Dream Engine, a student musical based on Bertolt Brecht’s Baal, as part of his senior thesis. The story of a post-nuclear apocalypse future centered around the title character, the leader of a group of wild boys rebelling against the constraints of an oppressive society, and a vindictive aristocrat and his wife out to squelch the troublemakers who happen to be the parents of the girl Baal has fallen in love with. Even this student projects contained the seeds of genius Steinman would show himself to be. The lyric “Turn around, bright eyes” showed up in a song that became a precursor of “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, and the entire “wolf with the red roses” into to “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth” was a love monologue between Baal and the Girl. (It’s still featured prominently in Bat Out of Hell.) It also contained a song for the rebel tribe that eventually became “All Revved Up With No Place to Go”. Steinman claims that Broadway producer Joseph Papp saw the production and signed it up for that season’s New York Shakespeare Festival, but negotiations broke down when Amherst professors intervened.
In early 1974, Steinman began work on a new musical entitled Neverland, where he adapted his source material from The Dream Engine, overlaying new material inspired by J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. The show received a 1977 workshop production at the Kennedy Center (starring Ellen Foley, the female soloist featured throughout the Bat Out of Hell album, as Wendy) which ceased to gain further traction, but Steinman and friend singer Marvin Lee Aday strongly thought several of the songs in particular, “Bat Out of Hell”, “Heaven Can Wait”, and “All Revved Up With No Place to Go”, were exceptional and should be the nucleus of an album for singer Kim Milford, a West End rock musical theatre star with credits in Jesus Christ Superstar and The Rocky Horror Show. But Aday believed so strongly in the material he petitioned Steinman to rethink the artist. Side note: Aday’s stage name was Meat Loaf.
Although the team had an inconceivably hard time selling the album. (According to Meat Loaf’s autobiography To Hell and Back, CBS Records mastermind Clive Davis rejected it, proclaiming Steinman not only knew nothing about writing, he knew nothing about rock and roll; we all have our bad days) Finally, Cleveland International Records purchased the contract and released Bat Out of Hell in October, 1977. The album was an international hit, topping the UK and Australian charts and moved to the US the following year, where it’s biggest hit, “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” peaked at #11 on the Billboard Top 40. The rest is history. The team followed this accomplishment with Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell in 1993, another Billboard #1 chart topper, and Bat Out of Hell III: The Monster is Loose in 2006.
In a parallel timeline, in 1996, Steinman began work on a movie musical with the working title Bat Out of Hell 2100, which expanded on Neverland with more music from the Bat Out of Hell universe. The movie was never made, but Steinman continued to work on the project over the years, adding and expanding with music from his other sources until Bat Out of Hell, the Musical would receive its world premier at the Manchester Opera House in 2017. After a successful West End premier, several London transfers, a handful of Olivier nominations, and an international tour, it further spawned a North American Tour with temporary residencies at Toronto and Las Vegas before finally landing an off-Broadway premier at New York City Center which sadly closed to mixed reviews and canceled its Broadway transfer. This new 2025 version announced a US National Tour that abruptly ended sending me to Philadelphia for an additional show added for closing night.
Knowing the history of the piece, it was easy to mix the whimsy of Peter Pan with the angst of Brechtian counter-cultural discontent. Since that correlation makes things more cohesive, I’ll summarize the story using parallel descriptions, which were used in Steinman’s Neverland version. In a futuristic, post-nuclear society [London], a mutation occurred amongst those directly exposed to the explosion which froze their DNA to the age of 18. This band of mutants, angry with the oppressive class that rules over them, live underground at the far end of an old metro tube now referred to as “The Deep End” [Neverland} and are branded “The Lost” [The Lost Boys]. Their leader is Strat [Peter], a rock and role biker vigilante at war with the leaders of the ruling class above, tyrannical dictator Falco and his jaded wife Sloane [the Darlings, and in a nod to most stage adaptations which double the roles, as the villain, Falco also is Captain Hook]. Things get complicated when Strat and the Lost lead a protest march outside the posh Falco Towers, when Falco’s rebellious daughter Raven [Wendy] sneaks out for the adventure outside her prison of her bedroom, and makes off with Strat’s T-shirt after it’s stripped from him in a raid. The next night, Strat breaks into Raven’s bedroom to retrieve his lost shirt [his shadow] and there is instant chemistry between the star-crossed pair. Strat whisks Raven away to The Deep End to pursue their forbidden clandestine love, where we meet some of the featured Lost, including Strat’s strong second-in-charge Zahara (who also secretly moonlights as Falco’s private nurse, whose main job is providing anti-dream medications to Raven, making her a stand-in for Nana the dog, “nursemaid” to the Darling children), who has an unrequited love for Strat, along with her persistent, kept-at-bay suitor Jagwire, ethereal Valkyrie, beautiful and sexually fluid Ledoux, and the runt of the group, Twink, a younger gay teen teased by the older Lost. Tink also has an unrequited crush on Strat and resents Raven [obviously, Tinkerbell]. Falco’s attempts to defeat Strat and reclaim Raven end in a near fatal motorcycle crash where Strat is thought dead, but when Zahara injects him with a dose of Raven’s blood, he comes back to life and successfully rescues Raven and Sloan, who has decided to leave Falco. During their Deep End symbolic wedding ceremony, Tink becomes jealous and offers to take Falco to Raven. In the ensuing struggle, Tink is shot and dies, making peace with Strat. When captured, Zahara forces Falco at gunpoint off a cliff into a lake [Hook walking the plank], where he emerges effectively “baptized”, repentant and cleansed of his evil. Strat and Raven, Falco and Sloane, Valkyrie and Ledoux, and even Zahara and Jagwire reconcile. Tink is revived by the overwhelming good [Peter’s “Do you believe in fairies”” speech] for a happy ending.
Just a blue-eyed, blond-haired, black-hearted boy…
As Strat, Travis Cormier is a perfect easy-on-the-eyes, harsh-on-the-ears, tight-in-the-body matinee idol rock star at the center the piece. (If Cormier is how Steinman envisioned the character, it makes sense that he pursued the strapping British stage idol Milford for the music.) Although he was showing signs of vocal strain for this final performance, which is understandable screlting a full Meat Loaf rock concert eight shows a week, he was still a commanding presence and had great chemistry with Carly Burns’ Raven. He looks every bit the rock star revolutionary and sells his songs with energetic vigor. Obviously he gets all the big numbers and is great on “All Revved Up With No Place to Go” and “Wasted Youth”, and excellent on his extended first act finale of the title song. But the rebel turns extra tender and is smooth with Raven on their love duets of “Making Love Out of Nothing at All”, “For Crying Out Loud”, and “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth”. His mystique and charisma make his delivery of the classic “On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?” seduction riddle, waiting for the perfect lover to complete the dialogue, natural and romantic, when it could risk sounding stilted and artificial in lesser hands.
Good girls go to heaven but the bad girls go everyhwere…
Carly Burns as Raven is the perfect mix of good girl and trouble, with a belting voice to carry the big important power ballads assigned to the track. Her solos are Steinman’s more introspective moments, such as “Heaven Can Wait” and the quieter duets with Cormier listed above, but she turns around and rocks daylights out of the Ellen Foley lines when required, especially “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth” in the finale. (Raven obviously knows the answer to his riddle.).
Who needs the Young?
Sometimes its not the young who get and fully appreciate rock and roll, but the once young who were there for its birth. For this reason, Cormier and Burns get the most stellar support from the seasoned actors playing her parents. As Falco and Sloane, Travis Cloer and Tori Kocher bring the whole package. The perfect degree of campy acting, strong, clear rock voices, and powerful stage presence that it takes years of experience to acquire. And the pair more than rise to the occasion when Steinman entrusts them with the best song of his career. And the duo deliver the vocal performance highlight of the evening. At Raven’s 18th birthday party, the pair get liquored up and, amidst their caustic barbs at each other, raise the question of what did they ever see in each other? Song cue the familiar guitar riff starts, and the duo reminisce about that oh so long ago and and oh so far away night at the lake when they first fell in love. Their rendition of “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” is the spectacle of the night. Not only do they wail the song, they, at the stated point of the opus, confidently strip to their sexy hot pink and black skivvies and reenact the memory on the cake table. Their subsequent moments are almost as memorable, from Cloer’s act 2 opener “In the land of the Pigs, the Butcher is King” where he rules his imprisoned captives as an operatic madman, and their 11:00 reconciliation owning their section of “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” with, as the couple who had drifted furthest apart, the most heartfelt vocals of the three. Sadly, there’s a hugely missed opportunity here in not incorporating Barbra Streisand’s Steinman epic “Left in the Dark Again”, the saga of a wife waiting up at night for her philandering husband to come home from his latest tryst, for Sloan as a tear-the-house-down lament. The lyrics fit the character and the story, and Kocher would have owned the evening delivering it.
Rock and roll dreams come through…
The Lost bring strong back up and execute energetic rock dances to enhance the music. Standouts are Tamara Denecia Daly as Zahara who brings strong Jennifer Hudson-like vocals to her memorable half of “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” and “All Coming Back to Me”, as well as Kris Bona as Jagwire returning her energy in the duets. Conor Crowley as Ledoux brings a leading man swagger to his pansexual character, and a confidence in his approaches on Strat. Paige Ann Mills as Valkyrie is a rock and roll fanboy’s dream, straight out of a White Snake video. Only Trevor Groce struggles a bit with Tink’s fragility, and comes off more angry and toxic than hurt and longing.
I’m looking for a ruby in a mountain of rocks…
John Bausor’s Scenic and Costume Designs were on the minimal side. The slight set was a mere two upstage platforms, one for the band and one set up to be Raven’s bedroom, surrounded by some heavy chrome circular entry-ways. The costumes were basically a unit base for the ensemble in a preponderance of denim and leather with some lace and studs accents in the biker/punk rock and roll vein of the show. The Falcos and Raven had a variety of signature looks, and Strat changes T-shirts on occasion, which made that initial venture into Raven’s bedroom to retrieve his lost shirt seem a little superfluous. None of the costumes were extravagant or distracting, but the Falcos’ were classy in a mock rock Dynasty way, keeping with that 80s theme.
Patrick Woodroffe’s Lighting Design is pure rock and roll, harsh beams of light changing configurations and intensities throughout. Although they sometimes obtrusively aim directly out at the audience blinding them, but that’s par for a rock concert if not a musical, so the discomfort enhanced the mood of the evening.
Sound Designer Garrett Owen had the hardest task of the night, balancing the maximum volumes of the band and the vocalists, with superior results. It was expectedly loud, to be sure, but the vocals were surprisingly clear and the lyrics comprehendible, which is rarely the case in rock concerts let alone rock musicals.
If I gotta be damned, you know I wanna be damned dancing through the night with you…
Xena Gusthart’s Choregraphy is classic rock and roll, with explosive bursts of energy and angst. The standout segment again is the above-mentioned staging of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” in which she not only plays out the action of the song in real time as described, but the party guests also strip to spandex athletic undergarments and backup dance in moves reminiscent of the “Time Warp” party scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’d like to think this was a clever nod to Meat Loaf’s iconic cameo in the movie.
Out of the frying pan and into the fire…
Unfortunately Jay Scheib’s Direction, crucial to any good production, is the weakest aspect of the show, mostly for scaling down the physical aspects of the show. As the bulk of the musical is rock music with minimal dialogue, it’s even more important to delineate proper space, time, and action carried out over the lyrics so it doesn’t become a bare bones concert. It’s important to specify what the familiar lyrics pertain to as far as plot and setting. When compared with videos of the off-Broadway production, the downgrade is sadly massive. What was formerly full stage scenes with scene changes, using the projector screen walls to accent the sets with surrounding atmosphere–wallpapers in the Falco mansion/Raven’s bedroom (which were distinct full-stage spaces in that production; here every scene in Falco Towers was played in Raven’s cramped bedroom platform with a bed, up to three actors, and a cameraman all jockeying for limited space). Considering a majority of the Peter Pan story–the entire first act to be specific–takes place in Wendy’s bedroom, this tiny corner of the set was overused and claustrophobic with poor sight lines. It needed to be center stage like prior productions.
Even sadder, in the previous recorded productions, the birthday party cake table during “Paradise” transformed when, mid-song, Falco ripped away the tablecloth and everything on it to reveal a turquoise convertible underneath that the pair climbed into to literally act out the song’s action. Also, at the end of the New York production, a downstage corner featured a small on-stage pool of water that Zahara backed Falco into, submerging him for a few bars only to emerge after executing an underwater costume change for the finale. Neither happened and either would have given the show the extreme, over-the-top visual bump and cohesiveness it needs and deserves.
The biggest miscalculation was eliminating all traces of the motorcycle that is actually a plot point sung about liberally in the title song where a critical crash occurs. It is also a visual staple of all the album covers and the marketing logo for the show. A bike crash with a bike that is pantomimed in a national tour is inexcusable. If the show only had featured just that one bike prop, the rest of the downgrades wouldn’t have been as crucial.
In the land of the pig, the butcher is king…
But the star of the evening and the sole reason for the show is the legacy of Jim Steinman and his contributions to the rock and roll songbook. Steinman is one of the most influential but underrated songwriters and producers in musical history. He has written staples of top 40 radio play not only for Meat Loaf but for artists as varied as Air Supply (“Making Love Out of Nothing at All”), Celine Dion (“It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”), Barry Manilow (“Read ‘Em and Weep”), Bonnie Tyler (“Holding Out for a Hero” and, arguably his best known composition, “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, a staple of drunk girl karaoke everywhere), and Barbra Streisand (“Left in the Dark Again”, undeniably his best composition you’ve never heard or have forgotten about). All of these songs as well as the entire Meat Loaf catalogue bear the earmarks of a well-constructed Jim Steinman epic: stories of intense emotional longing, often with dark to borderline vampiric undertones; multiple musical movements featuring incredibly clever lyrical and puns; slow burn arrangements that start small or even spoken, build, then erupt in grand musical climaxes; the most complex and layered orchestrations since Phil Spector’s infamous Wall of Sound; and an extended running time to allow all this musical drama to build and climax (I would safely estimate the average Steinman musical epic is a cool 7 minutes long, way beyond desired radio play length. Legend has it that his original version of Dion’s “All Coming Back to Me” clocked in at well over 12 minutes, and the impresario literally cried when he had to compromise and cut it down to a mere 7 ½ for air play). Yet for all these accomplishments, Steinman has only one major award, a pair of Grammys for Dion’s Falling Into You as 1997’s Best Pop Album and Album of the Year. “All Coming Back to Me” also won him a Billboard BMI Award for Song of the Year.
It’s all coming back to me now…
The reason Bat Out of Hell works better than it should is because not only is Steinman a musical genius, but because this isn’t just another jukebox musical, shoe-horning songs into a fabricated, random story or an artist’s bio-musical. Instead, from the beginning decades ago, he has always envisioned this collection of songs as the score of an ever-expanding musical, then lifted pieces out for radio play and fame in the process. Now here it is all at home where it belongs in one epic, big, loud, beautiful, messy evening of rock and roll ecstasy.
It’s sad because Steinman is maybe the most prolific rock and roll composer never to have scored with a Broadway composition, having three failed high-profile attempts. Andrew Lloyd originally asked him to write the lyrics for The Phantom of the Opera as a fan of his dark, obsessive, Gothic style. He had to turn him down due to commitments producing a Bonnie Tyler album, but Lloyd Webber tapped him again to do the lyrics for Whistle Down the Wind, which sadly closed out of town in its DC try out. I saw it, and it needed work but it was far from unsalvageable.
His second attempt was transferring his European sensation Tanz der Vampire (Dance of the Vampires) which made it to Broadway but closed soon after because American audiences at the time weren’t used to the campy spoof of the vampire genre, based on a 1967 Roman Polanski comedy. (In an example of bad timing, just a few years later, that perspective changed when HBO introduced their successful True Blood.) I also saw this. It’s nowhere as bad as you heard. I found it highly entertaining, but the TImes critics and New York audiences were at the top their snobby superiority complexes. Starring an admittedly miscast Michael Crawford, the show ran about 6 weeks before closing after 56 performances. The legacy of that musical is the stunning seduction song “Vampires in Love”, know on the Billboard charts as “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, which is exceptionally beautiful and haunting in a vampiric setting.
Lastly, the 2019 off-Broadway run at New York City Center of this musical also closed after 6 weeks, going no further. All three are highly successful in London and across Europe, Tanz de Vampire in particular being a German and international sensation abroad. And, sadly with Steinman passing in 2021 and Meat Loaf following him in 2022, it’s doubtful he’ll ever get that Broadway distinction he deserves, pending an unexpected revival of either Whistle Down the Wind or Bat Out of Hell.
You took the words right out of my mouth….
As major a part that Steinman’s music has played in the soundtrack of my life, and the varying reviews I’ve been hearing from different US companies over the years, I was coming up in advance with a wide range of possible loglines for this review inspired by the words of Steinman himself. On a scale of “All Revved Up With No Place to Go” to “Paradise by the Stage Footlights”, honestly neither extreme was accurate. So let’s leave this combination, diary entry/rock and roll history lesson/theatrical review on this note:
1) Most importantly, the music–the hardcore rock band, the high octane rockstar performers, the energetic backup dancers, the first-rate arrangements, the impeccable sound balance–are all undeniably stellar.
2) The experience–getting to hear a crucial part of my formative musical upbringing, a major landmark of my musical life executed so well, and the chance to be a 17-year-old boy lost in this rich music for a few hours again (Karen Irwin, you were definitely there in the empty seat next to me)–priceless.
3) So what if the physical elements and artistic directorial vision were sorely lacking and could have made the show way more cohesive and impressive? Let’s just average the math and compromise to say…
Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad
Here’s hoping this Bat flies back out of Hell sometime in the near future, with the tighter vision and stronger production values this Gothic Opera deserves.
All photos from the New York City Center off-Broadway tryout by Chris Davis Studios