Richard O’Brien’s anarchic, crazy, surreal, weird, bizarre and often incomprehensible musical The Rocky Horror Show is knocking on the door of turning fifty years old, and its success seems to continue as if it was fresh out of the crazy box yesterday. So, a review might seem pointless as the dressed-up audiences constantly fill every theatre it comes to, however, dammit, let us write one anyway. The Rocky Horror Show tells of the adventures of Brad and Janet, two young, newly engaged love birds. On a dark and grim November evening, they run into car problems and find themselves at a Frankenstein-esque castle and meet handyman Riff-Raff, crazy scientist Dr. Frank N Furter and an assortment of crazy characters. What follows is a science fiction B-movie story which sometimes you can follow, and sometimes you can’t and oddly, it doesn’t really matter. I first saw The Rocky Horror Show in 2019, and it must be said it was a baptism of fire witnessing its crude, crazy humour and bizarre s
This tour of Bat Out of Hell - The Musical has become sadly a double-tribute as it tours throughout the UK into 2023 and the love of its creator Jim Steinman, and the man who made his work world-famous, Meat Loaf, both lost in the last year, runs through the cast in this impressive version of the show. The storyline of Bat Out of Hell takes the Peter Pan idea and warps it into a dystopian world of a group of youth known as The Lost trapped forever at 18 years of age. The centre of this group is Strat, who, after a chance encounter, becomes under the spell of Raven. Of course, into this mix must come a megalomaniac, as all dystopian worlds really need. This is the father of Raven, Falco, who, with his wife Sloane, battle The Lost, Raven’s relationship with Strat, and indeed their own very bizarre relationship, to the backdrop of Steinman’s music. Bat Out of Hell doesn’t start particularly well, be it the performance or a show issue, for the first twenty minutes there is a lack of clarit