My poor ears ... it’s so noisy I spilled my beer!
DESPITE what you might think, big-boy rocker Meat Loaf does not appear in the new Bat Out Of Hell musical which has reached the London Coliseum. Some of the marketing material has been opaque about that.
Repeat: Meat Loaf himself is nowhere to be seen or heard. Do not buy tickets if he is the person you want to see.
What a bonkers, black-clad, doom-laden night of Wagnerian schlock this is. The plot, as much as I could understand of it, is a futuristic take on Peter Pan.
a handsome youth called Strat has been condemned to live forever at the age of 18 in a world of make-believe, fighting evil. Peter Pan’s Tinkerbell has here become a younger boy, Tink, who has a crush on Strat. He ends up betraying Strat out of sexual jealousy. all this happens in a grimy, science-fiction hellhole of a city (its archi- tecture looks much like modern London, interestingly enough) where a nasty capitalist called Falco maltreats heroic youngsters forced to live in the sewers. are we sure Jeremy Corbyn didn’t write this storyline? Falco’s daughter, Raven, naturally falls in love with Strat.
This cliched plot is so ill-told, it becomes peripheral. The only point of the evening is to hear some of the many hits written by Meat Loaf collaborator Jim Steinman. These include You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth, Two Out Of Three ain’t Bad and What Part Of My Body Hurts The Most? The answer to that last question was easy: my ears. From the very first bonejolting chord – which made me spill my beer – this show is screamingly overdone. That is the point, really: camp, Gothic excess.
Golly, it’s loud. There are guitar riffs as noisy as a jumbo jet landing next to you, blokes showing off their Charles atlas upper-arms, a dominatrix maid with blue lipstick (played by Danielle Steers who has a strikingly throaty voice), and a unisex chorus in yellow swimming costumes and high, white-powdered wigs. Falco (Rob Fowler) is such a cartoon villain, he even does a Vincent Price laugh at one point. Some of the dance routines are clumpily quick-fire, involving Seventies disco arm gestures like the Birdie Song at the wrong revs.
The acting, or more properly Jay Scheib’s direction, is beyond bad. In the middle of it all is andrew Polec’s Strat, pictured, blond curls and flat tummy. He reminded me a little of Peter Frampton. When not singing in his attractive but over-amplified baritone, Strat is prone to such pseudish gloomstering, he should be an EU Remain campaigner. ‘ Barbarians prowl in the shadows,’ he intones, ‘their heads rocking with rodents.’
Cue another song, another engine roar from one of the onstage Harley Davidson motorbikes, and another rush of grungy 20somethings on stage for yet another dance frenzy. The audience of balding 60- somethings in open-toed sandals enjoyed it more than I did.