Glenn Adamson and Martha Kirby in Bat Out of Hell: The Musical. Picture: Chris Davis Studio
Bat Out of Hell: The Musical continues at the Opera House, Manchester until 2 October 2021 and then tours until 5 November 2022.
Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩
As befitting a songwriter whose output is known for being on the lengthy and grandiose side, the story of Jim Steinman’s Bat Out of Hell musical is a long and protracted one.
Its origins began in a dystopian rock musical called The Dream Engine that Steinman wrote and starred in while at college in Massachusetts in the late 1960s. Steinman then met actor and singer Michael Lee Aday – better known as Meat Loaf – while working on another rock musical, More Than You Deserve, in New York in 1973. The Dream Machine then evolved into a musical called Neverland, heavily influenced by JM Barrie’s Peter Pan stories.
As Meat Loaf and Steinman continued to collaborate together on the National Lampoon Road Show in 1975, Steinman wrote most of the songs that would make up their first album. That project was entitled Bat Out of Hell, which was released in September 1977, marking the start of a – not always harmonious – creative partnership that would span four decades, include two follow-up albums and rack up 190 million record sales for Steinman, who sadly passed away in April this year.
Following the release of Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into Hell in 1993, at attempt was made to turn Neverland into a film – retitled Bat Out of Hell 2100 – incorporating songs from Steinman and Meat Loaf’s previous collaborations. That project derailed and, instead, rising out its ashes, came Bat Out of Hell: The Musical, which finally got its world premiere in 2017 at Manchester’s Opera House – the theatre in which it now starts its current UK tour.
After such a lengthy and tortuous development process you’d expect the resulting show to be a lumpen and unlikable mess. But, apart from raising a few snobbish eyebrows when it transferred to London’s Coliseum – home of the ENO – in 2017, the show has been embraced by audiences and, somewhat begrudgingly, critics alike, winning the Evening Standard Award for Best Musical in 2018 and embarking on what would have been sure to have been an endless round of international tours before Covid got in the way.
It’s probably not surprising considering its origins and the theatrical nature of the source material, that it works so well as a stage musical. And while the Bat Out of Hell albums exist in a cultural musical bubble all of their own, seemingly untouched or influenced by current tends or tastes, this production taps into a timelessly rich seam of genuinely operatic Wagner-esque rock opera, reaching heights not scaled since the likes of The Who’s Tommy.
The show has never done anything by halves, and this production equally turns everything up to 11, to a degree that might put off non-diehard fans and people not prepared for such an assault on their senses. Michael Reed’s arrangements favour bombast over subtlety and an effective though over amplified eight-piece band sound like an orchestra twice their size.
Jon Bausor’s set, which combines the penthouse from which Rob Fowler’s physically imposing ruler Falco oversees his city and the sewers that Strat and his gang of dispossessed, perpetually teenaged orphans call home is vast, filling every inch of the Opera House’s stage and not leaving much room for director Jay Scheib to move the cast around or Xena Gusthart’s choreography to breathe. Having some of the onstage action filmed and projected on screens and some cartoonish sound effects also give the production an unwelcome unreal feel and sacrifices some of its immediacy.
But the show is ultimately a vehicle for the songs, and they don’t disappoint.
And while the similarly dystopian-themed We Will Rock You tied itself in knots trying to incorporate Queen’s disparate greatest hits into a coherent narrative, Steinman’s rather less arch – although still lightly ironic – Gothic 1950s B-movie-inspired back catalogue of love, loss and youthful rebellion fits the framework of his – albeit – slight book perfectly.
Among a cast of strong voices, Fowler’s Falco and Sharon Sexton as his beleaguered wife Sloane – both reprising roles they originated – stand out. In fact, they combine so well on songs like ‘It’s All Coming Back to Me Now’ and raunchy Act I highlight ‘Paradise By the Dashboard Light’ – an epic, 10-minute, four-part song cycle that covers the decades of their relationship from courtship to middle age so effectively that it could be the basis of a whole other musical in its own right – that they threaten to overshadow everything else.
Glenn Adamson’s skittish Heathcliff-esque Strat, Martha Kirby as his love interest Raven and the supporting cast of lost boys and girls seem underdeveloped by comparison. But Joelle Moses and James Chisholm make the most of their limited stage time – and an on-off relationship that basically only really plays out over a song and half – as Zahara and Jagwire, with Moses especially shining in a roof-raising rendition of the show’s best song, ‘Dead Ringer for Love’. And it’s only really in the lengthy ‘Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are’ that any of the supporting characters get much of a backstory, and ensemble players like Kellie Gnauck’s Valkyrie get a chance to stand out.
But Adamson’s vocals rise to the challenge of songs that run the gamut from the muscular (‘Bat Out of Hell’, ‘All Revved Up With No Place to Go’) to the tender (‘For Crying Out Loud’). He’s also, importantly, the cast member that most fully embodies the fine line that the show treads between overblown earnestness and tongue-in-cheek irony. This is a show that knows what it is, and unapologetically delivers what is expected of it. It may not live long in the memory and in fact – when the morning comes – you may struggle to remember what any of it was about, but you’ll have had a hell of a good time while you were watching it.
Chris Bartlett
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