The musical version of the seminal Jim Steinman/Meat Loaf album Bat Out Of Hell is a marvel of ridiculousness. The book (Steinman), direction (Jay Scheib), and design (Jon Bausor & Meentje Nielsen with tour updates to the set by Ed Pierce) are some of the worst in the history of the form but, dammnit, the music is So Good.
Pretentious wrong people love to blanket hate on jukebox musicals but they’re just being pretentious, and wrong. There are some fantastic shows made from pre-existing material, a thoughtful book writer either sculpting a new story by close-reading a specific songbook (Mamma Mia, & Juliet) or scouring the entire canon for songs that sound like they were written for a predetermined story (Moulin Rouge, obviously, but this is also how the Onegin ballet got made). Music that is narrative and dramatic lends itself particularly well to this kind of adaptation- two words that more closely describe Meat Loaf’s albums than maybe any other artist. So what went wrong?
Big picture, the problem with this 2017 jukebox monstrosity is that it’s not really a jukebox musical at all. Legend has it that Bat Out Of Hell the album was actually always meant to be a musical. It’s based on a Peter Pan adaptation Steinman never got off the ground and, by some absolute miracle, the songs ended up shedding whatever theatrical throughline they were designed to have and were released in pure musical form in 1977, launching Meat Loaf’s career and earning legendary status as one of the best selling albums of all time. Reassembled here theoretically as originally intended, with some boosts from elsewhere in Steinman’s songbook, it turns out whatever estate lawyer wouldn’t allow “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” into JM Barrie’s legacy did the world the greatest favour. The book of this musical with its vague plot, tired themes, and cheesy dialogue has none of the complexity or intensity of the songs standing on their own. It’s nearly impossible for a single number, no matter how great, to break out from a musical cast recording to mainstream popularity unless the musical it comes from is pretty good. What a shame it would have been for any let alone all of these songs to be known mostly for being a part of Bat Out of Hell the Musical.
The production that’s currently on tour is fine. The leading man doesn’t enunciate basically at all, so a lot of Steinman’s fantastic lyrics are lost, and the plucky chorus doing their High School Musical pirouettes in torn fishnets are about as rock and roll as I am but the failure here really isn’t one of execution. Scheib’s big directorial contribution is ugly livestreamed video that pulls focus from the tangible performers, making it even harder for anyone to transcend the material. Still, the music manages to shine. An otherwise somewhat forgettable ingenue busts out with a massive rendition of “Heaven Can Wait” and the severely undercast Conor Crowley playing the nearly non-existent character of Ledoux steals the show with a single verse of “Objects in the Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are”. Underwritten supporting characters rely on classics like “Two Out of Three Aint Bad” and “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” for 100% of their character development and the expected showstoppers “Bat Out of Hell” and “I’d Do Anything For Love” take their respective places at the end of acts one and two without any real sense of why the characters are singing those particular words at those particular moments. They barely work as actual story beats but the best songs lift the audience up on the wings of sex and drums and rock and roll and it’s only when the high wears off that you come crashing back down into the show’s narrative hellscape.
Though a failure of competent storytelling at every non-musical turn, I’ll give Bat Out Of Hell credit for not being a biopic at least. Those not-really-musicals that simply tell the story of an artist’s life as they diegetically sing their own songbook are what give jukebox musicals their bad name. That’s just lazy. Bat Out of Hell is at least ambitious. I’d love to see an overhaul of this material with an actual book writer, not just Steinman fulfilling his vetoed intentions from half a century ago. There’s so much potential in these songs and they’re a riot to hear live in any, even this, context.