music trivia
It Takes a Hell of a Long Time to Get a Bat Out of Hell
How a 3-hour nude musical became a classic album on its way to the West End
“A great song should be an erection of the heart.” — Jim Steinman
I wasn’t expecting much when I saw the musical “Bat Out of Hell” the other night. I thought it would just be a musical revue of songs from the album. I was wrong. It was a great piece of theatre in its own right.
The story is sort of a punk Peter Pan meets Romeo and Juliet kind of thing. I shouldn’t have been surprised it was so good. It was 50 years in the making, and, in fact, it was a musical before it was an album.
Back in 1968, Jim Steinman was a lackluster student at Amherst College. Bets were taken on whether or not he would graduate. For his final year, he applied for the Independent Study programme. He planned to take an article he had written for the student newspaper and turn it into a musical. The article's title was “revolution…rock…the doors…jumping jack flash… Nietzsche…mayor Daley’s armpit.”
To be accepted for the Independent Study programme, Steinman had to sell this idea to a panel of three professors. He describes the experience in a speech he gave at Amherst in 2013. He thought it was going…
