BAT OUT OF HELL - Town Hall

I picked up a ticket for tonight when I saw the $32 ticket deal.  I saw it at City Center so I'm fully prepared for the mess of a book but I love the music enough to want to hear it live again.

I have no plans to see the show, but I did get this priceless review from a friend of mine and his partner 

This might be a hot take but I found this version of the book to be far superior to the original version that toured City Center (which I know was already cut down a bit).  If they just paired it with a bit more spectacle, I think they'd have the right idea--minimal book just to get us through the vague ideas of plot points but with all the focus being on the songs and enough spectacle to wow the audience into forgetting there's a plot to pay attention to at all.  I didn't miss any of the cut songs, though I also don't regularly listen to the cast album so I'm not sure if the uncut songs were pared down even more.  And I thought the cast delivered the lines well to find that line between earnestness and melodrama which kept things entertaining.  Maybe it's just because I had a better idea of what I was going into, but I found this extremely enjoyable, though I wish the scenery was fleshed out a bit more (for crying out loud, get them a motorcycle!)

The crowd seemed pretty receptive too, though I was surprised that the opening lines of It's All Coming Back to Me Now got the biggest reception (side note, I hope one of these days Marla's improv in Titanique is about Bat Out of Hell since this show's the reason that song isn't in Titanique).  The choreography can be a bit gratuitous/aimless but there sure are some fantastic dancers up there, so if you just view the show as a series of music videos it's a great time.

Is there still a character named “Tink”?

raddersons said: "Is there still a character named “Tink”?"

Yes, but their B-plot has been cut down so much that they're almost vestigial at this point, and have been played by either a woman or a man.

g.d.e.l.g.i. said: "raddersons said: "Is there still a character named “Tink”?"

Yes, but their B-plot has been cut down so much that they're almost vestigial at this point, and have been played by either a woman or a man.

"

LAME! I saw the original production in London and the Tink stuff really worked from my seat. I firmly believe: 

1. The character should be male. 

2. They should continue to fulfill the "Eponine" B plot (although, it's really the C plot)... 

3. They should have named the character "Twink." 

g.d.e.l.g.i. said: "

(Not that I'm arguing in favor of the plot. I'm unpopular in the Steinman fan community for being very vocal about not thinking it ever made sense, be it in 1969, 1977, 1994, or now, and that this particular version made the least sense even before they took a hatchet to it. But I do feel for the poor bastard, wherever he is now, to see what they've done to it.)"

As a Steinman fan I of course too have listened to the bootlegs, and read the scripts of the earlier versions of Steinman's apocalyptic, sexy teen Peter Pan musicals, but I think Steinman himself had kinda come to terms that the show wasn't going to really be *that* going back to the early Manchester version?  Or do I have it wrong....

 

EricMontreal22 said: "As a Steinman fan I of course too have listened to the bootlegs, and read the scripts of the earlier versions of Steinman's apocalyptic, sexy teen Peter Pan musicals, but I think Steinman himself had kinda come to terms that the show wasn't going to really be *that* going back to the early Manchester version? Or do I have it wrong...."

He grudgingly accepted it. A lot of these choices, I am given to understand, were made as his health problems continued to worsen, and were frequently done behind his back. I've seen numerous emails from Jim to that effect. He had much loftier ambitions, as par usuale, not all of which were realistic or likely to be implemented. The battle over songs vs. story was heated from day one, and though I have no love lost for the plot (as previously stated), I think that things landing so firmly on the side of the songs -- and increasingly so with time -- may not have sat so well with Jim.

SkidRow82 said: "They should have named the character "Twink.""

As on the nose as that is based on their casting choices (and hilarious, don't get me wrong), the character is named Tink as the last residue of the fact that this was supposed to be, as Eric creatively puts it, an apocalyptic, sexy teen Peter Pan musical.

Alright, you know what... as a primer for those who are watching and were barely able to piece together the plot (and I'm not spoilering this, because it seems barely any of it remains in the show anymore), this piece began life as a loose rock adaptation of Brecht's Baal back in the late Sixties called The Dream Engine.

Set in the distant post-apocalyptic future, the satirical-dystopian story, narrated by a mad Historian, concerns a young boy named Baal who, along with a self-assembled nomadic group of savages called The Tribe, lives in the former Big Sur in California. Together, they rebel against the restraints and limits of their society, exemplified by an evil city run by the military and the church. [Per Steinman, "All of the villains were killer nuns. […] in the future […] the church had all the money, so they merged with the army and had munitions. The army was […] these killer nuns, with these […] flapping habits, that strangled people."] Their mortal enemies are Max and Emily, the parents of the Girl, a young woman with whom Baal has fallen in love. The story ultimately ends in a fatal clash between the teens and the adults, with a finale featuring an ensemble-wide display of nudity.

At some point in the mid-Seventies, Jim began reconceiving it with a marginally more commercial twist, retitling it Neverland and beginning to style it as a dark, futuristic take on Peter Pan. He saw a world where kids don't grow up and wondered what the result of that would be, concluding it was far from a light or sentimental idea, especially if you aged them up to teens. Quoting an interview from 2003: "I took it literally. I thought it was actually a great science fiction concept that if a kid were 18 for 80 years, what would he be like? I thought that was a great subject for science fiction. For one thing, I thought he'd end up like Caligula, totally insane and mad. Because if you're 18, you've got to have sensation and excitement and thrills like every second and everything is life or death and urgent and it's all, you know, so primal and important. And if you do that for 80 years, you're going to be exhausted, and you're going to be almost totally insane trying to find new excitement, new thrills, new ways to ignite passion. And on the other hand, you have to ask yourself, do you change at all? If you live 80 years, do you become wise through experience, or because you have an 18-year-old's soul and brain and body, do you stay 18?" As a long-time fan of West Side Story, he also liked the possibility of portraying the myriad of conflicts between the Indians, mermaids, pirates, Lost Boys, etc., as gangs fighting over turf, which is even more dramatic if you plant them in a dystopian hellscape.

(Around this point, it was pitched to the Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital, which still owned the Peter Pan IP, for all intents and purposes, at the time, for approval. Jim lost them right around the time they discovered the killer nuns.)

It then went through several lives as a possible film, during which time it was described as a cross between West Side Story, Star Wars, and A Clockwork Orange. Confusing, to be sure, but an apt description.

By the '90s, it had evolved into Bat Out of Hell 2100, which is the closest to our present entertainment, barring significant streamlining. The Dream Engine and Neverland were gradually disappearing in all but world-building. The plot now takes place after "a series of nuclear mistakes, chemical disasters, a couple of earthquakes, and one major volcanic eruption" that severed Manhattan from the continental U.S. The federal government sold the island to a private company, Obsidian Oil, which rebranded the territory in its name. The northern half of Obsidian was a haven for the rich and powerful, who lived in luxury in a fortress-like safe development known as "Paradise Lots," while the southern half, rechristened Neverland by its inhabitants, was wild and lawless, dominated by extraordinary gangs, all of whom fought for and over turf, supplies, and control. Emily was now simply the Mother Superior, the religious leader; Max had divided into two characters, Dr. Darling (the pillar of science and industry) and Captain Hook (the Darth Vader-like, ruthless police chief who gets off on torture). In addition to Wendy, Baal was now Peter, and both the Tinker Bell and Tiger Lily equivalents (Tink and Tiger Lillianne, respectively) had fully developed plot lines as potential rivals for Peter's affection.

Once they filed off the serial numbers and did enough cutting to obliterate all but the barest elements of this, you have present-day Bat​​​​​​. To draw the loose comparisons for you: Strat is Peter, Raven is Wendy, Zahara is (vestigially) Tiger Lily, Falco and Sloane are Jim's by-then-signature (to those in the know, anyway) blend of the Darlings with Hook himself (and Max and Hook are now back to being one person), and Tink is Tinker Bell. ...yep.

Updated On: 5/1/26 at 12:55 AM

chrishuyen said: "I'm sympathetic to this as it seems like something that Steinman wanted his whole life, but as a Bat Out of Hell fan that only came to the material by way of the musical, it seems like there's a lack of focus (or perhaps too much?) and the long writing process had allowed the songs to take on a life of their own. While not strictly speaking a jukebox musical, it nonetheless feels like one simply because so many songs feel dropped into the scenes, and the audience seems to mostly just be waiting for the songs they want to hear. A bit of an interesting exercise in how intentions vs interpretations of art can diverge.

But also there are so many inconsistencies in the songs with the plot being told that it seems strange that this was always the intention (why are they suddenly in the California wind when it supposedly takes place in NYC? I did see that at one point it was changed to Coney Island but then changed back when everyone hated it--hilarious)

re: Tink, I found him a lot more tolerable in this version than the City Center version, and not sure if it was more cutting down of his book scenes or just the performer himself, but I found him extremely whiny before and only moderately so now. I think he's only a child in the sense that Strat and the others are frozen at 18, while Tink is 16 or 17, so still technically a child but close enough in age."

In order:

To your first couple of points, the reason it feels like a jukebox musical is partly that a lot of the song slots were arbitrary. From the start of this incarnation, there was an ongoing push to fit in and strongly emphasize as many hits as possible, rather than prioritize plot function. For someone versed in how the show is more or less supposed to work, it would not be terribly difficult to make the songs fit more organically (including either reverting to the California location or picking a different ballad that isn't location-locked), but that's not foremost in the producers' minds.

Re: Tink, the situation involving the Lost, which is poorly conveyed (and honestly not 100% sure it was a fully established part of the plot in this version), is that the government was experimenting to create a race of invincible super soldiers and instead succeeded in freezing these kids in their teens, except for Tink, who is significantly younger, very early teens. (One draft had him as young as 10 back in the early Aughts, but to make it less creepy, they put him at like 13-15 to everyone else's 18 in the final product.) His being frozen younger (read: his immaturity) is ostensibly the reason why he handles his betrayal arc so poorly. This is not to dismiss your thoughts, just to explain. He was extremely whiny because he's meant to be the kid brother who wants to be seen as one of them, so to speak.

Sources have led me to understand that they took advantage of Steinman's severe illness to make a lot of decisions for him, and, unable to intervene directly due to physical inability to travel, he eventually decided to let go and let God, so to speak.