Musicals, with their complex marriage of narrative and music – not to mention movement, design, and other technical needs – can take years to develop. Hamilton was written over seven years. The Music Man took nearly a decade. Bat out of Hell, composer and record producer Jim Steinman’s passion project, however, had been in the works since 1968.
It spun out of a musical called the The Dream Engine – a show he created at university about outcast youths clashing with authority figures – which was slated for early development by the Public Theatre in New York. The show contained early fragments of songs that would later dominate the rock charts but never quite came together. Steinman was pulled on to another musical project at the Public, and met the performer Meat Loaf.
