There is some dispute as to the origins of the phrase: “Fred Astaire was great, but don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did, but backwards and in high heels.”
Watching Bat Out of Hell: The Musical, one can’t help but imagine improbable variants of the same sentence. Not only are the cast required to match Meat Loaf’s mighty vocal range across a range of Jim Steinman-penned hits including It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, Making Love Out of Nothing at All, and I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).
They are required to perform while squirming on car bonnets, scrambling up vertices and crashing prop motorbikes.
“Meat Loaf had a three octave range which is huge,” says Bat Out of Hell’s lead, Glenn Adamson. “So Jay Schieb, the director, thought, What could be more impressive than that? How about trying to sing those three octaves while also being an acrobat? Throughout the production, we’ve added more and more. It’s like a competition. Could I lie down and sing and then jump off that rock? Yeah, I can. That’s what I love about it. You do your workout on stage every day.”
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Jay Scheib is a director and designer of plays, operas and ballets, with a particular flair for hybrid reinventions and events, notably his recent opera based on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. Scheib’s use of a roving camera and a split set add to the physical challenges (and obstacles) faced by performers on stage.
“It’s quite literally like an assault course,” says Martha Kirby, one of the stars of the touring production. “You’re up and down. And then there’s a camera. So you’re playing in two different worlds in one show. The camera picks up so much more than if you were standing in the middle of the stage and performing outward to the audience. So you have to pull everything back on camera. It’s fun to play between the two, though.”
Musical theatre can be a protracted business at the best of times, but few projects can match Bat Out of Hell: The Musical’s complicated history.
While the West End and Broadway have hosted many successful jukebox musicals, from Mamma Mia to Green Day’s American Idiot, Bat Out of Hell, uniquely, was originally envisaged for the stage.
Several of the songs on Meat Loaf’s 44-million-selling album Bat Out of Hell were written for Jim Steinman’s Neverland, an abandoned attempt to mount a dystopian rock musical based on Peter Pan.
When that project didn’t, well, pan out, the hit-maker that the Los Angeles Times once characterised as “the Richard Wagner of rock and roll” upcycled some of the existing tunes and wrote some more for one Michael Lee Aday.
The outsized singer, who would become a household name as Meat Loaf, had already worked with Steinman on the 1973 Vietnam-era musical, More Than You Deserve, and the National Lampoon Road Show. His operatic vocals were matched by an equally imposing wall-of-sound, forged by producer Todd Rundgren, and Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street cohorts, drummer Max Weinberg and keyboardist Roy Bittan.
Two years and dozens of rejections later, the seven-track Bat Out of Hell album was released by Cleveland Records, a tiny subsidiary of the Epic label, to little fanfare and insignificant sales. As Steinman noted in a 1993 interview: “It didn’t fit into any trend. It’s never been a part of what’s going on. You could release that record at any time and it would be out of place.”
“It was interesting to have Jim Steinman in the room every day in rehearsals,” says Rob Fowler, who originated the role of Falco, Bat Out of Hell: The Musical’s villain. “He was far out there. He was from a different planet. One day he came into rehearsals with a Darth Vader mask on. As you do. And that was that. I think you can tell that from the material. It never sounded like anything else. No one was ready for six-minute radio songs. The music has this kind of 50s, 60s thing going on, but then it’s not that either.”
The album would ultimately slowburn its way into the best-selling records of all time but, at first, most of the interest came from Australia, the UK and Ireland. (Meat Loaf fans will recall that later, in 1989, when the singer’s career was in the doldrums, he toured all over Ireland, from Bundoran to Moate.)
An explosive performance of Paradise By the Dashboard Light on the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978 was so popular they screened it again the following week.
“He wasn’t like any other entertainer,” says Fowler. “He didn’t have the silver spoon background. If you watch any documentaries about Meat Loaf, you know he had a tough upbringing, that his father was quite mean to him. He was out on the street at an early age and he just kind of found his way. You can see that edge in The Old Grey Whistle Test performance with Karla DeVito. He’s pushing boundaries. He’s almost snogging the face off her. But in person, he was like a big teddy bear.”
In 2017, Meat Loaf took to social media to denounce Sony’s 40th anniversary reissue of Bat Out of Hell. “For those of you who do not know, Jim and I get no royalties from Bat and never have,” he wrote. “They admit they have sold 44 million. Jim and I have gotten, I am serious, pennies.”
That may have been part of the reason that Steinman kept coming back to his initial idea. Over the years, the composer and Meat Loaf became embroiled in various legal disputes, but Bat Out of Hell II: Back into Hell, released in 1993, sold 26 million copies and produced the international hit I’d Do Anything for Love (But I Won’t Do That).
In 1997, Steinman revisited the Neverland concept with a film script called Bat Out of Hell 2100. It was 2015 before Steinman oversaw a three-week development lab in New York, followed by an extensive workshopping period in Manchester.
“We thought back then this is either going to fly or it’s going to die,” recalls Fowler. “So did everybody. Even though there was so much money thrown at it. We have Pink Floyd’s manager, Phil Collins’s manager, we have the person who fixes every gig for the Rolling Stones and Barbra Streisand. But it might have been a two-week run. We didn’t care. We were just having so much fun. And I think that transmits from the stage to the audience.”
The book, rather appropriately, explores teen angst with a range that matches Meat Loaf’s vocals.
Set in the futuristic city of Obsidian, The Lost, a group of teens who can never age, rage outside Falco Towers, where the named tyrant (played by Rob Fowler) and his put-upon wife, Sloane, resides. The rebellious gang, including Tink (Killian Thomas Lefevre), Jagwire (James Chisholm), and Zahara (Joelle Moses), live largely outside of — or more accurately under — society, until their leader Strat (Glenn Adamson) falls for Falco’s daughter, Raven (Martha Kirby).
Picture West Side Story meets Peter Pan meets Der Ring des Nibelungen.
“The madness is the beauty of it,” says Adamson. “It’s so out there. But then you see these characters say these lines and the other character responds. I’m never apologetic about the fact that what Strat is saying is bonkers. But he meets this girl who responds to bonkers with more bonkers. Jim Steinman used his big, insane lyrics to create the script and people seem to love it. They know the script by heart.”
Bat Out of Hell: The Musical premiered in Manchester in 2017 before transferring to the London Coliseum, home of English National Opera and a venue to match the project’s baroque sensibilities. Following the Coliseum premiere, an emotional Meat Loaf declared: “All I can do is cry.”
The musical has subsequently opened in New York, Germany, Canada and Australia, winning an Evening Standard Award along the way.
A major 2019 tour across the UK and Ireland was interrupted and delayed by Covid, allowing the cast — including originating players Rob Fowler and Sharon Sexton, and newcomers Glenn Adamson and Martha Kirby — months in which to hone their performances. Conversely, the delay meant the loss of two key players: Meat Loaf died last January, aged 74; Steinman died from kidney failure in April 2021, aged 73.
“There’s a sense of having to honour the material in a different sort of way than you might have had to do when they’re alive sitting there watching you,” says Kirby. “There’s now a worldwide fan base out there. And that’s so incredible. I feel very honoured that we get to continue the legacy at this point in time. I hope that somewhere out there, Jim and Meat Loaf are happy with it.”
It feels right and proper that Steinman’s immortal love story has inspired its own love story. Back when the musical was being developed in Manchester, Rob Fowler fell for his Irish co-star Sharon Sexton. Five years later and Sharon has recently given birth to their son, T-Rex. That won’t stop her returning for the Irish leg of the tour.
“Every member of her family is coming to Dublin for the show,” says Fowler. “She’s already looking incredible. She’s determined. She’s put a lot of pressure on herself. But I think she’s a typical Irish mum. She will always come through.”
Bat Out of Hell: The Musical runs at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre from August 30th to September 10th
