Reviews 2017
Reviews 2017
✭✭✩✩✩
music, lyrics and book by Jim Steinman, directed by Jay Scheib
David Mirvish, Ed Mirvish Theatre, Toronto
October 25, 2016-January 7, 2018;
Dominion Theatre, London, GBR
April 2-July 28, 2018
“All Revved Up With No Place To Go”
The North American premiere of Bat Out of Hell The Musical, which has arrived here direct from London after a two-month run in London’s West End, received the usual Canadian opening night standing ovation even though the show is a load of bombastic nonsense. The songs, all written by Jim Steinman, are incredibly well sung, but the story is ludicrous and the characters pure cardboard. To paraphrase one of the songs, “One out of three ain’t good”.
The songs of Bat Out of Hell The Musical are best known as recorded by Meat Loaf on the albums Bat Out of Hell (1977) and Bat Out of Hell II: Back to Hell (1993). The first Bat Out of Hell album actually had its origins in 1974 as a musical called Neverland, which told a version of the Peter Pan story set in a dystopian future. There has been a massive earthquake in California and part of the state has broken off and become the giant city Obsidian. An 18-year-old boy named Baal has escaped from the “Asylum for the Chemically Insane” and started to form a pack of stray children called the Lost Boys.
Sadly, 40 years later once we get to Bat Out of Hell The Musical, even the setting makes no sense. As projections on the set inform us, the year is 2030. Manhattan has, for reasons unknown, become an isolated island in the Atlantic renamed Obsidian. The self-appointed warlord of Obsidian is a man named Falco, who lives in Falco Tower, the font of whose name looks suspiciously like that of Trump Tower. While Falco rules above ground, below ground in the city sewers the character once called Baal, now renamed Strat (perhaps after the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar) rules the Lost Boys (who also include girls). They, again for reasons unknown, are fated to remain frozen at age 18 forever. Thus, a once plausible sci-fi set-up has accrued elements that make it implausible and are never explained.
While Strat (Andrew Polec) leads the Lost Boys in an ineffectual protest against Falco’s power outside the heavily guarded Falco Tower, Falco’s daughter Raven (Christina Bennington) has a chance to glimpse Strat, the two fall in love at first sight and Raven steals Strat’s sweaty T-shirt as a memento. Afterwards, we discover that the love between Falco (Rob Fowler) and his wife Sloane (Sharon Sexton) has soured. When Sloane finds Strat’s T-shirt in Raven’s bed, Falco vows to kill him and exterminate all the youth of the city. Luckily, Strat makes his way to Raven’s balcony-less, upper storey window (by unknown means since this Peter Pan does not fly), and they meet and confess their love. Given her own unhappy life, Sloane, decides to help Raven meet Strat, but Falco somehow finds them and Strat is nearly killed in a motorcycle crash. This is just the first act.
Virtually every character we cared nothing about in Act 1 gets a song in Act 2 after which we return to not caring about them since they are not integral to the story. It feels as if Steinman is trying to cram every one of his songs that ever charted into the same musical.
One problem with hearing so many Steinman “hits” back to back over more than two hours is that we can’t help notice how similar they are. They come in four different tempi – fast, rapid, medium and slow – but the structure is the same. The first half is sung quietly while the vocals in the second half become increasingly loud and more soaring. This has led some to call Steinman’s brand of rock “operatic”, but the best opera composers show much more variety of musical composition than this and they certainly do not have every song soar in approximately the same way as Steinman does. The effect, especially in Act 2 where the songs have little dramatic purpose, is mind-numbing. You feel as if you’ve heard the same tune sung, only with different words, about six times in a row.
Director Jay Scheib has had all the performers deliver their lines in an overemphatic, melodramatic manner consistent with the general excess of the production. Strat is meant to be considered a poet and woos Raven by repeating the line, “On hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?”, a line the audience rightly greets with sniggers rather than with swooning admiration.
Nevertheless, despite the acting, the one great virtue of the production cast’s singing. All those in the lead roles and even in the secondary roles have remarkably strong voices and put across Steinman’s songs with incredible energy. As Strat, Andrew Polec has a voice like the young Tom Jones issuing from the body of the young Christopher Atkins. Christina Bennington as Raven, Rob Fowler as Falco, and Sharon Sexton as Sloane, Billy Lewis, Jr. as Jagwire all have full, rounded voices quite unlike the hoarse, shredded voices normally associate with hard rock. Yet, the singer who makes the strongest impression of all is Danielle Steers as Zahara, Jagwire’s girlfriend. She sings the best-known song of the entire show, “Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad” and with her low voice and punchy diction sounds exactly like Cher in her prime. Unsurprisingly, Steers’ powerful rendition of the song received the loudest and longest applause of the evening.
If the singing was the high point of the production, the set itself was the low point. It is without doubt one of the ugliest sets I’ve ever seen in a musical. Unable to depict an upper world of wealth and a lower world of grime, designer Jon Bausour merely sets them side by side with the Lost Boys’ sewer stage right and the Falco Tower stage left, both looking equally grubby with clumps of working cathode-ray tube televisions pointlessly cluttering the two corners of the proscenium. While we do see two sturdy storeys of tacky French Provincial rooms in Falco Tower once the grey outer walls slide up, the surface of the the Lost Boys’ tunnel entrance is shaky and sometimes seems in danger of falling.
Scheib’s use of Finn Ross’s video deign is a constant distraction. For unknown reasons, Scheib has a videographer constantly recording everything Raven does in her bedroom. This is broadcast onto a large screen on the facing tower. Obviously, this is meant to function like the screen in rock concerts to give the audience a better view of what is happening in Raven’s second floor room, but it also look comically like Falco, rather than protecting his daughter’s privacy,. is broadcasting it to the world. Yet, chiming in with the innumerable inconsistencies of the show, this video broadcasting continues even when the videographer is absent. Then in Act 2 Scheib has arbitrarily decided to have Raven’s room hidden by a curtain so that we actually must watch the video screen to know what is happening.
Emma Portner’s choreography is distinctly uninteresting. She seems to cross Michael Peters’s choreography for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video with semaphore arm signalling and unimaginatively continues this for the entire show. For his part Scheib piles all his special effects into Act 1 – a car crashing into the orchestra pit, a really good effect of Strat’s motorcycle exploding with flame machines and confetti cannons for the finale – exhausting his creative resources and leaving no spectacle for Act 2.
The hipster couple next me left at intermission and in retrospect that seems like a wise choice. With all the explosions that conclude Act 1, the show feels over and, as it happens, Act 2 only adds layers of confusion and tedium to the action. Strat and Raven do get together at the end (no surprise there), but Steinman brings up yet doesn’t solve the absurdity of their relationship in that he will remain 18 forever while she will continue to age. Won’t that will be romantic when she’s old enough to be his grandmother! And Steinman keeps things loony right up the finale. Strat and Raven get on a Strat’s new motorcycle so they can start out somewhere else. Well, according to the map shown at the beginning, post-apocalyptic Obsidian is an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean so there is no “somewhere else” to go to. One thing that can be said for Steinman is that he does capture the essence of the white, male adolescent mind with all its self-importance, raging hormones, epic fantasies and lack of basic logic.
Bat Out of Hell The Musical is an overlong, ill-conceived musical poorly directed and designed and filled with a steady stream of portentous songs of teenaged angst that with a few notable exceptions refuse to be memorable. One can only imagine what this fantastically talented cast could do with better material.
After Toronto, Bat Out of Hell returns to London, opening on April 2, 2018, booking to July 28, 2018. For tickets, visit http://batoutofhellmusical.com.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Andrew Polec as Strat and Christina Bennington as Raven; Andrew Polec as Strat; The cast of Bat Out of Hell The Musical. ©2017 Specular.
For tickets, visit www.mirvish.com.
2017-10-26
Bat Out of Hell The Musical