Meat Loaf, musical theatre & what could have been

Musical theatre has often been the gateway to a lot of my interests. My family played Broadway cast albums in the car instead of pop music. I bought a pair of combat boots because they looked cool on Mandy Patinkin in Evita. I started reading Kurt Vonnegut because of a demo of Howard Ashman songs that included material from “God Bless You Mr. Rosewater.” I even finally started to listen to rock music because a CD of “Chicago II” without its silver jewel case sounded like an ill-fated sequel to Chicago The Musical. So I’m heartbroken to hear that Meat Loaf has passed away, this unique artist who intersected my disparate worlds of musical theatre and rock music.

Bat Out Of Hell is in my bones, probably one of the most important albums of my life. Listening through it today, I now realize that when I was first learning piano, I pounded on the keys because that’s how heavy the piano sounds on the album. Orchestrator Jonathan Tunick once said something to the effect of, “You can’t change the volume of notes that have already been struck, so pianists often substitute this with more notes.” Jim Steinman (who also passed away within the past year) played those notes. And that abundance of keys gave his music a grandeur matched by his lyrics. Many describe his music as “operatic,” but what I believe they really mean is “theatrical.”

Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf were both theatre kids. Meat Loaf was in Hair (on and Off-Broadway), Shakespeare in the Park, and in the stage and film versions of The Rocky Horror Show. Jim Steinman had written rock musicals in college and even had some of his works commissioned by Joe Papp. Steinman wrote adaptations of plays by Alfred Jarry and Bertolt Brecht. Many lyrics written for these projects made their way into his pop songs years later. The lyric “Turn around, bright eyes” from Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” had a dramatic context in an earlier musical. Steinman and Meat Loaf pursued theatre before anything else.

That theatre people don’t seem to know that these two artists were fellow theatre people first seems to me like a failing of theatre. But it also confirms the ways that theatre’s exclusivity and protectiveness of Broadway as a “brand” limited the types of stories that could be told onstage. Theatre’s gatekeeping unfortunately locked out a pair of artists with the vision to explore uncharted artistic territory and keep the medium relevant for a generation that was moving away from the legitimate theatre. This is the moment when musical theatre ceased to be popular music.

Theatre informed the shape and scope of Bat Out Of Hell. In fact, it was originally conceived as a musical adaptation of Peter Pan. And even as the mainstream rock album it became, there is still so much dramatic structure within it, from the scene before “You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth,” to a baseball play-by-play while two teenagers went at it in a car. These songs were given contexts that frame their dramatic arcs. There is so much musical theatre in this record.

And I find it tragic that musical theatre didn’t immediately embrace that type of storytelling. Rock musicals of the 1970s are comparatively very quaint, Broadway’s sanitized interpretation of pop music via Lawrence Welk or the 101 Strings. So while rock and prog and metal all developed on their own with subgenres branching forever outward, musical theatre continued to market shows to an audience that felt theatre music should only sound like “theatre music.” Singer/songwriters like Billy Joel were churning out songs like “Scenes From An Italian Restaurant,” constantly creating original characters with dramatic contexts. Anais Mitchell mused on Twitter the other day why Billy Joel never wrote a musical. Many pop songwriters could have. There was untapped potential out there for theatrical writing from pop songwriters. It has only recently become commonplace for pop writers to pen original musicals. Waitress and Kinky Boots were made possible by works like Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar, which in their time had to be released as pop albums prior to gaining the acceptance of the theatre community.

Bat Out Of Hell was developed and workshopped as a piece of theatre, but no producers took the bait, and the songs were rewritten for a non-theatrical medium. Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman struggled to find even a mainstream record label that would produce Bat Out Of Hell, and were quite literally “All Revved Up With No Place To Go.” However, theatre should always have been the proper place to go. The perception of rock music’s limitations to tell theatrical stories came true only through inaction. It’s easy to dismiss the merits of something that hasn’t been given a proper chance. Once Bat Out Of Hell found its audience in 1977, it became and remains to this day one of the best-selling albums of all time. Meanwhile, in theatre, it took decades before rock music was considered to be both dramatically valid and commercially successful with Rent’s 1996 Broadway transfer.

When people say “This rock musical doesn’t sound like a musical,” it is a back-handed compliment with unfortunate validity. Rock music and theatre developed separately for a while, and theatre has been playing catch-up for years. Rock music brought a generation together, and that generation grew up. Most producers rolled their eyes at what they still considered to be a fad and unintentionally created a wide generation gap that theatre companies have been working for decades to eliminate since. The dramatic musical experiments of artists like Meat Loaf and The Who catapulted them to legendary status, while the reluctance to embrace them shrouded Broadway in a crust of irrelevance.⁣⁣

I mourn the loss of Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman, and I mourn the potential for what theatre could have been if these two artists were given the chance to experiment in a medium they loved.

Will Anderson is the co-founder of the social media company The Theater Lovers with his wife. The brand makes original content to spark meaningful discussions about musicals.