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Bat Out of Hell

The Playhouse, Edinburgh

Four stars

 

America is hell in the late Jim Steinman’s rock and roll love story, reimagined in 2017 from his multi million selling albums for Meat Loaf as a long overdue jukebox musical. Steinman sets out his store in what used to be Manhattan but is now a dystopian dump, with youthful dissent beaten into the underground tunnels that line the city. Brought to life by director Jay Scheib, Steinman’s epic draws from Peter Pan, Romeo and Juliet and the sort of 1980s teen flicks where the good guys wear black leather jackets to make a suitably bombastic morality tale writ very large indeed.

 

It opens with Love and Death and An American Guitar from Steinman’s own 1981 album, Bad for Good. As delivered by Katie Tonkinson’s goth rebel Raven, Steinman’s spoken word monologue about attempted patricide by guitar is possessed by a low-key menace worthy of a routine by New York’s original No Wave bad girl, Lydia Lunch. 

 

Raven is at war with her wealthy father, Falco, even before she is gifted her long-suffering mother Sloane’s leather jacket for her eighteenth birthday. Raven finds salvation with Strat, the forever-teenage leader of The Lost, who hide out underground, occasionally coming up for air and a high-octane song and dance routine. 

 

What follows is classic love across the barricades stuff, as the large cast leap into Steinman’s huge back catalogue of hits that include Dead Ringer for Love, I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That) and of course the rip-roaring title track that first introduced Steinman and Meat Loaf’s musical adventure to the wider world. These are played with Spectoresque verve by the eight-piece band led by keyboardist and musical director Iestyn Griffiths.

 

As Strat, Glenn Adamson may be considerably more buff than Steinman’s original interpreter, but his voice is just as astonishing. As indeed are those of the entire twenty-two strong ensemble, who add colour to Steinman’s already larger than life canon. Sharon Sexton and Rob Fowler come into their own as Sloane and Falcon, while Tonkinson spars wonderfully with Adamson.

 

This is played out on Jon Abuser’s multi layered set with some of the action seen in close-up by way of Tom Samuels’ public access TV style live video feed. From this, Steinman and Schwab’s vision melds youth tribe aesthetics across decades to create a fantastical comic book style futurescape made flesh.


The Herald, January 8th 2024

 

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