A world-class musical engine drives show
Bat Out of Hell: The Musical
(out of 4) Book, music and lyrics by Jim Steinman, directed by Jay Scheib. Until Dec. 24 at the Ed Mirvish Theatre, 244 Victoria St. mirvish.com, 416-872-1212 or 1-800-4613333. This show is being talked up around town as the Meat Loaf musical, but the singular creative talent behind it — for better and for worse — is pop/ rock music legend Jim Steinman.
He’s the unchallenged king of the power ballad, who wrote the songs for the classic Meat Loaf album that features in this show and gives it its name, as well as hits for the likes of Bonnie Tyler and Céline Dion.
The cast here under Michael Reed’s expert music supervision sing the hell out of nearly two dozen of Steinman’s songs, careening into the show with full-blown passion and staying at that level for an exhilarating, exhausting, bewildering 21⁄ hours.
2 Their talent and enthusiasm are undeniable, but the story that Steinman has concocted is so ridiculous — and so lacking acknowledgement of its own excess — the show is perennially on the brink of imploding under the weight of its self-importance.
Our hero is wild-eyed Strat (Andrew Polec), one of the Lost, a rebel bunch of youth all stuck in their 18th year and, fashionwise, in a Billy Idol/ Pat Benatar moment from the early 1980s (evoked most effectively through Jon Bausor and Meentje Nielsen’s costumes, a symphony of distressed denim and thigh-length leather). Strat’s love interest is Raven (Christina Bennington), a poor little rich girl whose father Falco (Rob Fowler) both runs the town, and has sexy tattoos and a nipple piercing, which perhaps explains her perennial confusion and distress.
Strat and Raven desire each other, suffer, get together, break up, suffer and reunite. The relationship of Falco and his wife Sloane (Sharon Sexton) follows an equally torturous course, after they first provide retro entertainment by reliving their courtship through a randy performance of “Paradise by the Dash- board Light.” Secondary characters Zahara (Danielle Steers) and Jagwire (Billy Lewis Jr.) pop up out of nowhere as a troubled couple singing an astonishingly powerful rendition of “Two out of Three Ain’t Bad.”
The musical and physical talent of the company runs deep. Performers in smaller roles reveal amazing poprock voices and Emma Portner’s imaginative choreography gives them many occasions to show off their dance training.
All of this is staged on Bausor’s grandiose, postapocalyptic set, which moves the action between the Lost’s dark, subterranean habitat and the lavish interior of the Falco compound. Scenes played in a raised area representing Raven’s bedroom are filmed live and projected onto a big screen, a cool effect that helps the audience connect to the action, though why the characters don’t acknowledge that there are cameras filming their most intimate exchanges is one of the production’s many head-scratching elements.
Director Jay Scheib attempts some adventurous staging by having performers frequently sing to the camera or to a point of focus away from the audience, but this adds a level of embellishment that makes the material feel ever more heavy and selfimportant.
Asking for this show to make some kind of logical sense may sound un- fair, but there’s a massive imbalance between the relentless emotion coming out of the songs and the feebleness of the book scenes penned by Steinman that are supposed to hold the numbers together. The second act works better than the first, as dialogue dwindles to two or three lines before another hit pumps out.
Besides some fairly heavy-handed textual references to Peter Pan (including a queer subplot via a doomed character named Tink, played by Aran MacRae), echoes of a whole history of youth-oriented and rock musicals ( West Side Story, Hair, Rocky Horror, Grease, Rent, Hedwig and the Angry Inch) lie just below the surface of this material waiting in vain to be nodded at. A funny bit involving a motor vehicle and the orchestra pit is one of the few moments of selfaware humour.
Torontonians started showing their love for this show even before it officially opened; it’s already been extended through Christmas Eve. On opening night, though, it was only in the final number, when Polec belted out the first line of “I Would Do Anything for Love” and the audience whooped a spontaneous cheer, that a real connection between spectators and the material was achieved.
The musical engine of this show is world class, but someone other than Steinman needs to be brought in to fix the vehicle.