MANY intellectuals pick over and dissect JM Barrie’s fantasy fable Peter Pan, just as they continue to do with Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – and find dark hidden meanings within the text. The American writer, composer and lyricist Jim Steinman, sometimes described as the Wagner of rock music, certainly found some very dark, violent and highly sexualised themes in Barrie’s adventure yarn, on which he based the script for the Bat Out of Hell show.
If the 17 songs and the lyrics and storyline are anything to go by, Steinman, like Wagner, has the ability to write music which is best played and performed at a high volume. The score is taken from five phenomenally successful albums that Steinman and singer Meat Loaf created together – the Bat out of Hell trilogy, Back into Hell and The Monster is Loose – and MD Grant Walsh and his on-stage septet leave the vocalists no option but to blast out the numbers at full volume and power.
In keeping with the musical output, director Jay Scheib demands that the characters be stripped down, sometimes physically as well as dramatically, to the bare bones of their emotions. The principals respond to such an extent that by the curtain call Glenn Adamson’s Strat (the Peter Pan character), Katie Tonkinson’s Raven, (Wendy), Joshua Dever’s Al Falco, (Mr Darling/Capt Hook) and Sharon Sexton’s Sloane, (Mrs Darling), looked as fatigued as the full company who had raced energetically through Xena Gusthart’s re-arranged highly physical and gymnastic choreography.
Gone from the original story is the tongue-in-cheek contest between Peter and Hook, and in its place there is a hard-hitting, realistic battle between the despotic ruler of a futuristic Manhattan, Falco and the young Strat, leader of the rebellious The Lost, who live in the deserted underground system. Strat poses a double threat in that Falco’s daughter Raven, whom he has tried to keep hidden away in an ivory tower, has fallen in love with Strat and is determined to join him and The Lost.
It is easy to tie up Falco’s tricking of Carla Bertran’s jealous Tink (Tinkerbell), to give him temporarily the upper hand, with the original story. But it is more difficult to see where in Barrie’s tale Jim Steinman finds the thread that leads him to the vicious “love” scene between Joshua Dever’s selfishly cold Falco and Sharon Sexton’s wonderfully passionate Sloane.
The violence of this scene and the intimacy of the scenes between the young lovers are given an extra dimension by an on-stage camera person providing close-up pictures of the lovers for two video screens above the actual action.
Judging from the response of the audience, it was the 17 Steinman/Meat Loaf numbers they had come to hear rather than a re-working of a favourite old story – musically and vocally this show delivers them in a style that must have pleased virtually everyone. Bat Out of Hell continues at Bristol Hippodrome until Saturday 13th September.
GRP