#1 – Batman the Musical

In 1999 Jim Steinman, the man who wrote many of Meat Loaf’s most famous songs, was commissioned to write a Broadway musical about Batman, which would be directed by Tim Burton. The show never went anywhere, but Steinman’s demos live on, and some of the songs have been repurposed – Steinman himself re-used some tracks for Dance of the Vampire, and Meatloaf grabbed some of the songs for Bat out of Hell III.

I’m not quite sure what happened to Batman the Musical, but I do know that Warner Theatrical dumped it in favor of Lestat, another musical ripe for this list (that adaptation of Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles featured music by Elton John and Bernie Taubin, and ran for a month). Steinman released the demos on his website, some of which are actually pretty good and, with some work, could have been incorporated into a reasonable show. As the megafans at the Batman the Musical fansite Dark Knight of the Soul say, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Phantom of the Opera were both major Broadway hits, so the weirdly gothic darkness of Batman the Musical may not have hurt it.

As for the show’s plot – not sure. The Joker and Catwoman would have been in it, as Steinman wrote songs for both of them. Here’s one of The Joker’s songs, Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?