When You Touch Me Like This

To the always magnificent surroundings of the London Coliseum to see what has (with good reason) been hailed as one of the theatrical events of the summer. The traditional home of the English National Opera, it presently plays host to the ultimate in rock operas — the West End premiere of Bat Out Of Hell — The Musical.

Now I stress I’m no theatre critic, and I have friends who run their own theatre blogs who are far better at this than I, so I cannot sit here and offer an expert critique of the staging, plotting or set design. And what I’m about to write will show that I’m far from impartial where the subject matter is concerned. So I cannot offer an expert review.

Every music fan has their core act. The one whose work you know backwards. The one whose work you will collect obsessively, knowing that life will be incomplete without the complete set. And you’ve probably purchased it several times over on multiple formats. Well for me that act is the writer/producer and sometime reluctant performer Jim Steinman. I can recite lyrics, know the release dates of the songs and even to a certain extent name the musicians playing on the records he produces and just who is singing backing vocals where. I can get lost for hours in the poetry of his lyrics and like no other songwriter he speaks to the depths of my soul and peels back emotions I never knew I had buried. These are songs, productions, performances that are guaranteed to make my heart fly and to transport me in an instant into the near-mythical world they inhabit.

So I struggle to begin to explain how it felt to sit in a theatre to watch a musical production of all of his most famous songs bundled together for the very first time. Finally telling a coherent tale of everlasting teenage passion in a dystopian future. These were songs I fell in love with at the age of 16 and then spent the rest of my life falling in love to. In my head they had always played out on a grand stage, one filled with performers and chorus lines. And now it was all happening for real. I was transfixed from the very first bars. Because this was something that was at once very special to me.

By the end of Out Of The Frying Pan (And Into The Fire) I realised I was crying. I’ve never sat in a theatre with tears of joy running down my face before. But that is what happened to me. I was in the middle of what was surely a deep and everlasting emotional experience.

In countless interviews, Jim Steinman had long spoken of how songs from Bat Out Of Hell and associated projects were always parts of a musical story he was never able to stage. So they became mini-concept albums instead. Peter Pan on motorcycles, all set in an age where you are 18 forever and love and lust never grow old. And finally, this has happened. A large part of the joy was hearing songs that had always seemed like fragments of a story you never heard the start of, suddenly slot into place and become a core part of the plot. Never before had it been explained who the protagonist in the song Bat Out Of Hell was with and just who they were running from. And we finally get to find out.

The Peter Pan references are writ large across the plot. The Lost (boys), we are told, never grow up. Lacking a mother to look after them. There’s even a jealous and ultimately tragic character called Tink.

There were other lovely subtle touches too. The constant tease as the lead character Strat is constantly frustrated that nobody knows the correct response to “on a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses”, the fun thrill when Raven finally does so, only for the pair to be interrupted, leading the audience on the night I was there to erupt into laughter. But when You Took The Words Right Out Of My Mouth is finally delivered it is inevitably a treat. The casting of Andrew Polec as Strat is also an inspired choice, the singer and actor has perfected the exact New York drawl that Jim Steinman himself uses. So he gets to deliver the famous Love And Death And An American Guitar monologue which opens the show in the exact same voice as used on the records, and throughout the show, you find yourself almost believing the writer and composer is there on the stage himself.

In a summer where my life seems to be filled with emotionally transformative and moving experiences, this was up there with the greatest one of them all. And of course, modern technology means that on the train home you can connect with the cast directly and tell them just what it meant to you.

The musical is on for a strictly limited run before it moves abroad. But if you happen to be in London before July, trade a body part for a ticket. I truly can offer it no greater praise.