2025 Bat out of Hell The Musical

[nightinr]

What does everybody think of the updated version of the musical?

[ThatWriterGuy]

[letsgotoofar]

That about sums up my reaction.

[Nige78]

Originally Posted by nightinr

What does everybody think of the updated version of the musical?

What has changed?

[letsgotoofar]

This covers everything from the Manchester opening in 2017 to NY, 2019. There have been more since then, but I can't be arsed to keep track of them all. Someone else may chime in.

[Nige78]

Originally Posted by letsgotoofar

This covers everything from the Manchester opening in 2017 to NY, 2019. There have been more since then, but I can't be arsed to keep track of them all. Someone else may chime in.

Thanks - I really wasn't expecting such an in-depth answer!

[ianmar]

I'm going tonight in Glasgow for the first time. I don't know why but it doesn't seem to have sold particularly well this time around.

[ianmar]

Bloody hell it was good! If they weren't all having an absolute ball onstage then they deserve an oscar. Second half much stronger than the first imo but musically it was sound throughout with some amazing vocals. I found it slightly emotional in a couple of places when I though of Jim and Meat no longer being with us.

The only negative thing I found was some elements of the vocal performance of Glenn Adamson in the lead role. What I always loved about Meat is that he performed songs with the most ridiculous and sometimes hilarious lyrics and belted them out as if they were life or death serious. Most of the cast did the same but Glenn was continually laughing or even winking to the audience during big songs and I found that kind of camp performance to be inappropriate. Generally, I thought Glenn was fantastic and the real star of the show. I'd just like him to have performed the songs with a little more of the Meat Loaf emotion.

Definitely worth seeing for anyone who gets the chance. I'm taking my daughter again next week before they close in Glasgow.

[ajf33]

https://tixel.com/u/marieh41

My partner is selling 2 stall tickets for the 24th may 2.30 performance if anyone is interested! £100 each (face value £118 each)

[ajf33]

https://tixel.com/u/marieh41

Now £80 each

[ajf33]

Willing to take £100 for the pair if anyone is interested, tickets ready to transfer via pdf.

[ajf33]

Now sold.

[AndrewG]

Finally seeing it this week.

Thought I would be forced to go during the week but easy availability even for Saturday night.
Which probably isn't a good sign.

I'm expecting good performances but a bottom of the barrel show / plot. Probably on par with We Will Rock You or even worse.

After having seen the excellent Tina! show last year I wish this had just been a personal autobiographical show about Jim & Meat.

• Their meeting
• Funny stuff about struggling to get a record deal
• Funny stuff recording Bat (Todd Rundgren being a bit of a funny jackass)
• Rise to fame with Bat out of Hell,
• Meat meeting his first wife (Took the words right out of my mouth),
• Jim recording solo and it bombing and Meat recording Dead Ringer struggling with voice.
• Meat almost killing himself with drugs (ending with Bat out of Hell for Act 1 probably apt here)
  
• Jim recording with Bonnie Tyler, (open act 2 with rehearsal of Total Eclipse into the full song).
• Meat struggling in the 80s but touring his ass off
• Meat & Jim back together for their extraordinary comeback with Bat 2,
• falling out again somewhat over the Bat 3 and the naming etc
• and ending with their friendship rekindled for eternity with Braver Than We are as the finale. (Meat / Jim / Ellen / Karla)

What a missed opportunity in hindsight.

Their own story was far better than what anyone could have ever imagined!

Will post my thoughts after I see this carry on what we got though.

[ThatWriterGuy]

Something to keep in mind: What you see this week will bear little resemblance to the 2017 show -- which was still a hugely wasted opportunity, sadly.

Regardless -- have a good time. Curious to hear what you make of it in its current incarnation.

[ThatWriterGuy]

Some background RE Jim's original intention VS what you get circa 2025.

Family.

It was all about family, generations, youth -- and what that really means -- VS the jaded way in which the nuclear family has been portrayed over the past couple decades (or more). Jim wanted to tap into that. You have this almost nostalgic version of Americana coupled with the slow, creeping erosion of a post apocalyptic Nanny State.

There was some pretty heady stuff in the original drafts we worked on.

Not so much now, but elements still remain.

I'm not a fan of: the choreography, the costumes (still - though they attempted to remedy this, multiple times, after my feedback during previews in Manchester), the Glee-like performance VS the "rebellious rock concert overtaking the theater stage" that Jim intended.

Did you -- any of you -- know that Jim FULLY intended on using Oculus headset tech to completely reinvent the notion of theater as we know it?

True story.

And yet. Any yet.

The question lingers: Does ANY of this REALLY feel like BAT OUT OF HELL to you?

The story, imagery, and characters that we grew up with (from both records)?

Inquiring minds want to know.

[letsgotoofar]

I mean, I'll level with ya, I never bought the Peter Pan shit. Not in a million years. Jim may have used it as a starting point, but was light years away from any of that by the time Neverland was reaching maturation in the '70s and '80s; once you hit Bat Out of Hell 2100 in the '90s, the clearest antecedent of the Bat we have now (or had from approximately 2016 to around 2018 or '19), any influence was vestigial at best.

And in any event, as fun as a grim-dark reboot can be, here's my controversial hot take (as the kids say), influenced by numerous conversations with my dramaturgical creative partner: he didn't get Peter Pan at all, if that's what he got out of it. (Substitute character names from Bat wherever you like in what follows; although the Peter Pan mythos is essentially wisdom teeth to this thing, enough is infused in the structure that you can do so.)

It's not actually about youth, except in the sense of how brilliant it feels to have it when you're a child. The story isn't about whether eternal youth, joy, and freedom turn you into Caligula; in a certain sense, you don't need to make it any darker to portray that. (By which I mean: Peter is kind of a little monster already in-text, a profoundly unnatural and blithely uncaring child, because he's a representation of childhood. And it's worth noting, he is a child. Disney and the 2003 film, for all their respective virtues, were pushing it by making him a young teen. To make his analogue forever seventeen? Baby, that's a grown-up by Peter Pan standards. Even in 2003, there's a vague sense that one of the reasons Wendy has to leave him behind is that he gets kissing, he gets crushes, but he's not going to be able to meet her on her maturing level. Making your Peter Pan figure emblematic of the thrill of sex as a teenager means he's no longer Peter Pan. You've swerved off the road, to use a metaphor Steinman might have liked.)

It's about Wendy, and more specifically, her realizing she does want to grow up. She's ready to go back home, to get a room of her own, to remember this as one last grand hurrah of childhood (and a grander one, at that, than most people will ever get).

Making it a story about reckless young adults who are trapped as reckless young adults, and not gleefully arrested children and the girl who realizes she doesn't want this, fundamentally changes the story. There's a story there, but it's not the story of Peter Pan. The fact that the Lost are all so aware of how much they've aged internally is diametrically opposed to Peter Pan. (By comparison, think about how the film The Lost Boys isn't concerned much with Peter Pan beyond the allusion in the title. The allusion there works despite these being permanent young adults because they don't have much sense of their age. They're frozen older, but they're still frozen.) Tink becoming a Claudia (from Interview with the Vampire) archetype, disregarding that Tinker Bell is a whole other thing here, is especially out of place with the theme.

As for the sexual subtext, at best, Peter can be an awakening for Wendy (such as in the 2003 movie, where he's, like, 13 too), but he'll never grow up. He can't share in that, or, again, he stops being Peter Pan and starts being his analogue in Alan Moore's Lost Girls. If you put it in the story, it has to be via Captain Hook, as part of the "adulthood being scary but kind of alluring on its own terms" journey Wendy goes through.

And speaking of Hook, he bungled that, too. Having Hook as an authority figure (beyond the significant double casting that tends to come up, and the 2003 movie, again, I think did well on that by making it feel less like Wendy is attracted to her father and more like her father is to some extent the archetypal adult man and Hook is kind of the shadow of that, since for once Mr. Darling and Hook were kind of opposites and not mirrors) doesn't work either because Hook is Peter Pan's plaything. Functionally speaking, Neverland is Peter Pan's domain. Hook is there to lose to Peter Pan again and again; he's frankly been driven a little insane by it (and there's some hilarious subtext reading it as an adult, as J.M. Barrie emphasizes how dangerous and intelligent this guy is and puts him in a situation where a permanent kindergartner maims him and he doesn't have much control over it).

Hook is the antagonist not because he has power or control; it's because he's a vague representation of power and control used as Peter Pan's personal Washington Generals. (Google the Harlem Globetrotters, I can't do all your homework for you.) Making your Hook figure actually in charge of anything? Again, you can fashion a story about rebellious youth from that, but it won't be the story of Peter Pan.

Bat tries to have its cake and eat it too while still trying to come off like Peter Pan. Sometimes, you have to know when to stop at an allusion. (Joke ending of this lecture: "...and that concludes why Tanz der Vampire is a much better explication of Jim's favorite themes (albeit unintentionally), thanks for coming to my TED Talk.")

But then, TWG, you tried to avoid all that and were limited in how much of it you could mitigate. Isn't that right?

[ThatWriterGuy]

Originally Posted by letsgotoofar

But then, TWG, you tried to avoid all that and were limited in how much of it you could mitigate. Isn't that right?

Yep.

Not my sandbox, not my name above the marquee sign.

As for Barrie, Disney, Wendy and Pan -- all of that source served as an initial catalyst for what Jim wanted to do (and I'm talking way back in the 80s here when Jim first started writing a treatment for a BAT musical), but those conversations about those characters and those archetypes were long gone (though acknowledged in the rear view mirror) by the time that I was asked to work on the book. The themes remained, in a broad sense, but Jim made it clear that he wasn't looking to reinvent Peter Pan.

What he wanted was a rock n roll tale of eternal youth (thematically) VS modern day domestic suburbia (albeit in a pseudo urban setting), and the inevitable power struggle that comes with the burden of every teen whereupon he comes of age and realizes that he has become his own father (okay, that last clause was mine -- it was never used and there was no interest in taking that strand any further).

Jim didn't want a jukebox musical.

He was dead set against it.

He used We Will Rock You by name ... as an example of what he DIDN'T want.

Jim got sicker (9 strokes, lost the power to compose, lost the power of speech 3 times over, lost motor function).

Producers cast the whole musical behind his back, locked him out, and changed everything.

Jim's words to me, afterwards, were "sickened, badly shaken, and shocked".

Make of it what you will.

I have the receipts.

[letsgotoofar]

Originally Posted by ThatWriterGuy

As for Barrie, Disney, Wendy and Pan -- all of that source served as an initial catalyst for what Jim wanted to do (and I'm talking way back in the 80s here when Jim first started writing a treatment for a BAT musical), but those conversations about those characters and those archetypes were long gone (though acknowledged in the rear view mirror) by the time that I was asked to work on the book. The themes remained, in a broad sense, but Jim made it clear that he wasn't looking to reinvent Peter Pan.

He clung to the common elements/references for so long, even in 2100, that I thought it important to clarify that even at its roots, the premise was flawed, because he'd already long failed to grasp the source, or at least willfully ignored it after the initial point of connection. I already understood the above to be the case and agree with you that, regardless, the lingering Pan-ish elements didn't fit. (I'm biased because we know each other, but I always thought your idea at least made sense by comparison.)