Bat Out of Hell
Composer: Jim Steinman Director: Jay Scheib
London Coliseum, St Martin’s Lane, London WC2 (020-7845 9300) Until 22 August Running time: 3hrs (including interval)
The very best musicals have a compelling storyline, thrilling stage pictures and astonishing sounds, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. Bat Out of Hell, a fabulously over-the-top rock musical based on the Jim Steinman songs made famous by rock star Meat Loaf, is devoid of any sort of plausible, let alone compelling, storyline. But it has thrilling staging and swaggering music in abundance. And as Steinman himself put it – in one of the classic songs featured here – Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad.
Steinman has always been the “Wagner of rock’n’roll”, said Ian Shuttleworth in the FT – the creator of such anthemic smashes as You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth (Hot Summer Night) and I Would Do Anything for Love, as well as the title song of this musical. And now, at last, Steinman “presents his Ring” in the form his inherently theatrical music cries out for – and “in a proper opera house and everything”. The plot on which he hangs the songs is three parts Peter Pan, one part Romeo and Juliet, plus a “generous pinch” of Escape From New York and a good dollop of self-mocking humour. In a dystopian future Manhattan, Strat, the leader of a tribe of neverageing teens, falls in love with Raven, daughter of the city’s tyrannical boss, Falco. It’s all as silly as it sounds, but it matters not a jot. Such is Steinman’s mastery of his material that even for those of us who are not Meat Loaf devotees, the experience is “thrilling”. Bat Out of Hell “already, right out of the box, feels like a classic”.
The show won’t win any awards for reinventing the musical, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. But this “riotous” invasion of the Coliseum (home to English National Opera) makes a “demented kind of sense, zapping its audience with a care-banishing current of wildchild zaniness”. It helps that the two leads are so fantastic, said Daisy Bowie-sell on Whatsonstage.com. Andrew Polec as Strat and Christina Bennington as Raven “blast these songs to the rafters” – and the chemistry between them is “flameinducing”. This show will make your “jaw drop” and your “heart soar”. Go.
Is he serious? That’s what many wondered last week when Daniel Day-lewis – the only man to have won three best actor Oscars – announced his retirement, said Eithne Shortall in The Sunday Times. Not that we were surprised. For decades, the actor has seemed deeply ambivalent towards his craft. In 1989, he walked off stage during a performance of Hamlet (reportedly because he’d glimpsed the ghost of his father, the poet Cecil Day-lewis). He hasn’t appeared in a play since. Then, from 1997, he took a five-year hiatus from acting, during which he moved to Florence and became a shoemaker’s apprentice. He was only lured back when Martin Scorsese offered him the tantalisingly lurid part of Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York (2002).
It’s easy to see why Day-lewis has mixed feelings about acting, said Christopher Goodwin in the same paper. His gruellingly immersive approach – learning to paint with his feet for My Left Foot, staying in character off set, etc. – entails a painful “psychological dislocation”. The actor, who has just finished making Phantom Thread, in which he plays a 1950s dressmaker, has admitted he often feels “empty” at the end of a shoot. In a 1992 interview, he confessed that he longed to “find a reason not to carry on with this work”. Only on my deathbed, he added, will I know if “the thing I spent my life doing was keeping me alive or killing me”.
Strange to say, there’s a part of me that hopes this really will prove to be his swansong, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. We’ve seen too many acting titans tarnish their reputations with late-career dross. “Ahem, Pacino, De Niro, we’re looking at you.” Day-lewis’s body of work is monumental as it stands. “Perhaps it’s best not to dilute this kind of legacy.”