Grammy-winning composer Jim Steinman died April 19 in Danbury, Conn. Born Nov. 1, 1947, in New York City, Steinman grew up on Long Island, where he attended George W. Hewlett H.S. In his senior year at Amherst College, he wrote The Dream Engine with Barry Keating for an independent study course and, after graduating, moved back to New York to begin a career in musical theater.
Over the next decade, Steinman wrote several Off-Broadway musicals, including More Than You Deserve with Michael Weller (1973, starring Meat Loaf), Kid Champion with Thomas Babe (1975), The Confidence Man with Ray Errol Fox (1976), and Rhinegold with Keating (1978). Steinman was reworking his college musical into Neverland, when he offered three of its songs for Meat Loaf’s solo debut album, Bat Out of Hell, which launched his pop career. Below is Meat Loaf singing “More Than You Deserve.”
Steinman’s subsequent pop hits included Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” Air Supply’s “Making Love,” Barry Manilow’s “Read ’em and Weep,” and “Holding Out for a Hero” from Footloose, which earned Steinman his first Grammy nomination. He reunited with Meat Loaf for the 1993 album Bat Out of Hell II, featuring “I’d Do Anything for Love,” which brought him two more Grammy nods. In 1997, he won the Grammy for Celine Dion’s Falling into You, which included “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.”
In the 1990s, Steinman returned to musical theater, including work on a film adaptation of Bat Out of Hell that was never produced. In 1996, Steinman wrote lyrics for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down the Wind, but after poor reviews of its D.C. tryout, the Broadway run was cancelled. A reworked West End production opened in 1998, and Boyzone topped the UK charts with a cover of the song “No Matter What.”
In 1997, Steinman worked with Michael Kunze on Tanz der Vampire, which premiered in Vienna and spawned productions in Estonia, Poland, Finland, Hungary, and Japan. The following year, the stage adaptation of Footloose opened on Broadway, bringing Steinman his sole Tony nomination. Below is a montage from the 20th anniversary production of Tanz der Vampire.
During the 2000s, Steinman worked on the Broadway adaptation of Dance of the Vampires (2002), the Swedish premiere of Garbo: The Musical (2002), the unproduced Batman: The Musical (2003), and the MTV film Wuthering Heights (2003). After recuperating from a stroke in 2004, Steinman finally realized a musical based on Bat Out of Hell, which premiered in 2017 at Manchester Opera House and made its way to Off-Broadway in 2019. Below are original stars Andrew Polec and Christina Bennington singing “Bat Out of Hell” at the London Palladium.