BAT OUT OF HELL: THE MUSICAL
London Coliseum, until August 22. Tickets: 020 7845 9300 IF it’s too loud, you’re too old. Jim Steinman’s musical based on the mega-selling Meat Loaf album is rock and roll in extremis. The imagery is Wagnerian apocalyptic: flame-throwing motorcycles, explosions, postmodern Valkyries in tattered leather and squalling electric guitars.
Steinman clearly does not believe in half-measures and if the tender love story at Bat Out Of Hell’s heart gets a bit bruised in the process, then it is a price worth paying.
The story is basically Peter Pan dirtied up with elements of Mad Max, Romeo And Juliet and The Shangri-Las’ Leader Of The Pack. In the dystopian city of Obsidian a tribe of mutants frozen at the age of 18 are in constant conflict with the cohorts of the evil Falco (Rob Fowler), a capitalist entrepreneur who lives with his bored wife Sloane (Sharon Sexton) and frustrated daughter Raven (Christina Bennington) in a vacuum-packed apartment out of reach of the teenage street gangs. But when young Strat (Andrew Polec) sees Raven on a rare outing in the city, it is lurve at first sight. There may be trouble ahead. This is not an evening for quiet contemplation. The rampaging score is played at seismic volume and the vocals, especially the collective choruses, are more sonic tsunamis than soaring melodies. But the songs hold up and there is a pleasurable kick of familiarity when the cast launch into Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad, Paradise By The Dashboard Light and the title number Bat Out Of Hell. Better still they are delivered by performers who are fearless in their interpretation. I have rarely seen so many great singers on stage in the same production. Polec is terrific, a tousled blonde rocker with an amazing voice who looks like a cross between Heath Ledger and
Iggy Pop. His three best friends Jagwire (Dom Hartley-Harris), Ledoux (Giovanni Spano) and Blake (Patrick Sullivan) are equally superb, especially in the best number Objects In The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are, a moving paean to male friendship. The girls are just as good with Bennington effectively poised between virginal sweetness and barnstorming rock chick while Danielle Steers’ Zahara and Sexton’s Sloane are phenomenal.
Sexy, raucous, violent and occasionally touching, it is only let down by uninspired dance routines which consist of little more than stomping, pogoing and air-pumping fists. Sort that out and Bat Out Of Hell gets the five stars it deserves.
TeRRoR
HERE is your choice: shoot down a passenger plane hijacked by a terrorist and heading for a packed football stadium or obey orders and let it crash into the crowd, killing 164 innocents by your action as opposed to 70,000 by your inaction. What would you do? That was the dilemma facing Major Lars Koch (Ashley Zhangazha) before he made the split-second decision that resulted in his trial for murder.
Ferdinand von Schirach’s play is a courtroom drama in which the audience is the jury. After hearing facts from defence and prosecuting counsels as well as Koch’s own testimony, we vote on whether he is guilty or not guilty of murder.
It is an intriguing premise and in spite of some longueurs, mentally stimulating. It is like watching a dramatised version of The Moral Maze in which the audience is involved, if not immersed.
There are some over-enthusiastic and unrealistic performances. Would defence counsel really insult a judge as readily as Counsel Biegler (Forbes Masson) does and get away with it? But it is held together by the authoritative weight of Tanya Moodie’s presiding judge. On the preview night I attended the verdict was not guilty by eight votes. But it could go either way on any night.