Bat Out Of Hell The Musical - MCR/Dominion/Tour/Peacock/Tour

Wow wow wow wow. Saw this last night and I have to say that I am utterly in awe. Flawless music. An insanely large number of very talented performers all on stage at once. Fantastic choreography. I would be inclined to say probably the best overall night out you can have in London at the moment. Spoilers impending, and I'm sorry for the VERY long review!


Music
Jim Steinman's score is utterly incredible. Being a huge Meat Loaf fan I already knew all of the songs (except one - maybe written specifically for the show?) but that didn't stop me being blown away by seeing the Bat vision staged in the Coliseum. It's only actually seeing the show that makes you realise just how many iconic Meat Loaf songs there are, in act 2 especially we hopped from hit to hit to hit and it's the sheer brilliance of the score that is the crux of the production. I personally would have swapped the order around slightly, I'd Do Anything For Love would maybe have worked better as an Act 1 finale with Bat Out of Hell saved to the very end, but other than that I think it works perfectly. Leaping in to a chorus of All Revved Up With No Place To Go sets the tone perfectly for the night as the high energy and almost ecstasy ridden performances never falter or dip below that level for the entire duration of the show. I found myself crying during It Just Won't Quit, which is weird as it's one that I almost always skip when I'm listening to Bat Out of Hell II, but I think this is a testament to just how well the songs are orchestrated and staged that every number, including Braver Than We Are's whine-fest Who Needs The Young, manages to be brilliant. Two Out of Three Ain't Bad is a brilliant number for part way through act 1, and it was then that I fully realised how many iconic numbers we must still have yet to come. I am SO glad that we got the full unabriged version of Paradise By The Dashboard Light, and it was such a privilege to get to see that song actually staged. Act 2 is a total treat for any die hard Meat Loaf with Heaven Can Wait, You Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth, Dead Ringer For Love and It's All Coming Back To Me Now being rolled off one after another like it's nothing. My favourite Meat Loaf song, which nobody except me seems to like, Objects In The Rear View Mirror May Appear Closer Than They Are, gets sung almost in its entirety by a series of great male vocalists so I was in heaven.


Performances
Andrew Polec is a delight as Strat. I have to admit the role isn't massively well written, he spends most of the show talking in incomprehensible poetry, but Andrew gives the role justice. He has a soaring voice that makes him perfect for the role, and his chemistry with his co-stars, especially Raven and Tink, is great. He's also very lovely at stage door, happily chatting to me for quite a long time about playing the role and what Meat Loaf music meant to him growing up. He accidentally made a comment to me about Meat Loaf not really being able to sing any more which he apologised profusely for, but to be fair to him he's right, so I couldn't begrudge him for saying it by mistake.

Christina Bennington is (let's be honest) the real star of the show as Raven. Her voice is to die for, It's Just Won't Quit and Heaven Can Wait being the two best examples of her beautiful vocals. Her belt is effortless and she glides over notes like it's nothing. Not having an alternate and rarely missing any shows, I would LOVE to know her secret. For someone who spends most of the show with a camera shoved in her face (or breasts), her acting has several layers and she takes a paper-thin characterisation and turns it into an Olivier worthy performance. I would love to see her play Elphaba one day, but at the same time I would happily watch her get a full year as Raven. She's a joy.

Sharon Sexton is my second favourite character in Sloane. Perfectly channelling her bitterness at life and the world whilst contrasting it with maternal love and deep rooted insecurities, Sharon gives probably the most rounded performance of the entire cast. I don't know how I haven't heard of her before because she's a performer totally in her prime, and her nuances and quirks bring Sloane to life and transform her into a character we can't help loving. Sharon's voice is to die for, and her growls in Paradise By The Dashboard Light gave me chills. Her high notes are really something else and I think it's a travesty that she hasn't played just about every lead role in the West End. She was also massively kind at stage door, grabbing cast members to get them to sign my programme and talking to me like an old friend despite never having met me before.

Rob Fowler is great as Falco. I've never really been a huge fan of the hyper-masculine patriarch type characters, so for Rob to have won me over is a testament to his great performance. Also, in person he's very friendly, warm and nice so he's clearly not playing himself. His voice is amazing, I think female vocals tend to sound much better than male ones almost without exception but his belt, impressive range and flawless tone make his parts a real joy to listen to. The role he plays makes him come across as a right knob, so the fact that somehow I'm still rooting for him at the end shows just how well he portrays it. He's brilliant in Paradise and in all of his act 2 power numbers and I'd love to see him in some other shows.

Danielle Steers is a phenomenal Zahara. Her character is written astoundingly badly (I'll get into that more later) but she still manages to turn this role into something brilliant, and she may well have the strongest vocals of the whole cast. She has a real feisty rock quality to her, and it adds to the charm of her character.

I also especially enjoyed the performances of the actors playing Jagwire, Tink and Ledoux, Jemma Alexander was a particular standout in the ensemble, I saw her in Wicked in 2014 so it was great to see her being great in a totally new capacity.


Story / Staging
Okay, so this is evidently the part of the show that doesn't quite match up to the rest of it. The book is paper-thin, and yet also somehow manages to be 95 times more complex than it needs to be. The fact that they need to dump exposition on the audience via newspaper / projection before the show starts illustrates that it's broadly inaccessible as a piece of theatre that you just sit down and watch. You could cut the entirety of the non-ageing element of the show and just have a group of rock-music loving homeless or poor people coming up against the local big business owner and nothing would be lost. The only moment it actually becomes relevant is to give Strat and Raven an excuse to sing I'd Do Anything For Love.

I think the ultimate downfall of the plot is that it takes itself too seriously. If it was a couple of vague parallel love stories punctuated with Meat Loaf songs, it'd be a 10/10 piece of theatre, but the emotional turmoil everyone goes through without much prompting means a lot of the sheer fun and energy of Steinman's music is lost. He definitely has melancholic songs (It Just Won't Quit, Objects, Heaven Can Wait) but the majority of his songbook is based around lust and the enjoyment of being young. The only love story that totally and unequivocally works is the Sloane and Falco one, and that's I think because we have so much time dedicated to it, and neither of them feel the need to behave like characters in a teen romance movie. Having said that, there has been a lot of effort made to get everyone into the right position to be in exactly the right emotional position to sing each song at the relevant point in the show. This could still be achieved without all of the baggage though.

Several plot strands are picked up and dropped without being properly explored. The shocking revelation that Zahara works for Falco is ultimately irrelevant, except when anybody needs to use her as a taxi service to get between the Deep End and Falco Towers. Even then, people come and go from the high security Falco Towers and specifically Raven's bedroom, more or less as they please. Strat's 6 month depression passes by instantly and it's stupid to suggest that either her or Raven have been mourning for 6 months over something which was clearly not Raven's fault. The cinematography in this show is fantastic, I love the use of cameras, although on a couple of occasions in the tower scenes they actually blocked off the view so we HAD to watch it on the screen, which is a shame because I'd rather have seen everything going on with my own eyes. It disappointed me to the extent that Zahara (and I suppose to a lesser extent the other females) were sexualised. Zahara's costumes all serve to accentuate her breasts, and there's a completely unnecessary scene in Falco Towers where Sloane and Falco have to squeeze past her in the doorway trying not to rub up against her. This is unnecessary and is an insult to Danielle's incredible vocals, acting and dancing to reduce her to eye candy. Several of the camera angles are deliberately designed to highlight her breasts rather than her face and it's just degrading and really doesn't need to be there and she could have had far more character development in the time they designated to having her standing there silently thrusting her boobs at everyone.

The choreography is great and very high energy, it's nothing to write home about but it perfectly embodies the excitement and thrill of being young, and manages to perfectly fill the Coliseum space. Staging wise, it's done very cleverly, I love the use of levels and how they portray so many different locations. The one scene I have a gripe about is Tink's death, which is just staged completely wrong. Falco arrives in completely the wrong place, meaning most of the action is taking place with everyone having their backs to the audience. In the commotion when he shoots Tink, there are too many people standing around near him, including Strat, meaning that it's impossible to work out who, if anyone, has been shot. The screams of "Strat! STRAT!" afterwards don't help, and it takes a while to ascertain that it's actually Tink that took the bullet. That whole encounter needs to be far sparser, with none of the other leads anywhere near Tink so that he can collapse to the floor without everyone swamping him and killing the moment.


This was a fantastic night at the theatre, and I'm going again today to see it twice more, and I'm sure will schedule in several more trips before it closes. Well worth seeing if you love Meat Loaf, Steinman, or just rock music.

Side note: Andrew told me that they've definitely recorded a cast recording for this, but that he didn't know if or when it would be coming out. He said that the reason there's been a lack of information is because nobody knows anything, not because they've been told to keep quiet.

The alternate Strat is on at today's matinee with the understudy doing the evening performance. The 2nd understudy Raven is on this evening, and the 1st understudy on on Monday. I asked Jemma Alexander if she had any Sloane dates and she said she thought she probably would but didn't know when yet.

Ooh, I forgot to say that the Coliseum dayseat policy is absolutely brilliant. I turned up at 6.30 and asked tentatively if I could have a dayseat, to which I was asked where I'd like to sit and I said as close to front row as possible, and I was given a ticket for the middle of the front row for £25! I was talking to one of the hardcore Bat fans who said that they will quite literally sell all of the remaining seats in the theatre on the day of the performance for £25 on Monday to Thursday, so that's something that's really worth taking advantage of.

Objects in a rear view mirror is one of my fave Meat Loaf Songs

I thought it was the WORST choreography to ever have graced the west end stage. They had relays and Mexican waves for Petes sake!

Well, I've just turned 80 and have been a fan of musicals sing Annie Get Your Gun in Sydney in 1948. I don't follow 'pop' music and knew little about Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman, but I thought Bat Out of Hell was sensationally good, despite some shortcomings as mentioned by others like the choreography and the storylines. It just blew me away with a superb score, amazing singing accompanied by a wonderful orchestra and a great sound design that allowed it all to be heard perfectly. In fact, I am still marvelling at how the score perfectly fulfilled all the requirements of a stage musical and yet seemed to be the essence of true rock as it was originally born in the 1950s. It gave me the kind of pleasure that I get only from musical theatre at its very best! I have a ticket for the last night and will try to go again between now and then.

It's whatever is available. Not sure on how many per person.

So they can sell you their overpriced items inside. No other rational reason for it.

Precisely. I could even accept the "you might have alcohol" argument if open bottles were banned. I can't see any genuine reason why an unopened bottle of water should be banned.

It also infuriated me how every single bag had to go to the cloakroom...again, in the name of security but what's the purpose of this? If you've done a thorough enough bag search and are happy that there's nothing untoward inside the bag, why insist on it going in the cloakroom? All it does is force me to queue for 10 minutes to get it back after the show because there's only one member of staff there, and piss me off a great amount.

On the drinking water front, they have tap water readily available in big jugs so that probably covers that argument, still beside the point though.

I bundled my water bottle in my cardigan and carried it under my arm - fine, they have jugs of water, but I can't take one of them with me after the show and into my evening show later!

Just a thought, but could it possibly be linked to their duty of care to protect the two and a half thousand patrons from a terrorist incident, and also help the financially devastated ENO actually make some money? I'm as miserly as the next theatregoer but I think that they provide a bloody good service & environment, that we really shouldn't complain about paying for. I realise that it has started to attract the lower end of the social spectrum and the rustling of sweet wrappers will only be drowned out by the rough neck birds who keep shouting out during the show...but lets not begrudge the ENO the chance to make a bit of cash.

One mans malteser is another mans ball bearing!