It’s Raven’s 18th birthday and her parents are throwing her a party. Sloane is drunk. Falco is casually violent. Raven continues to profess her desire to join Strat while Falco belligerently repeats his opposition. So, the usual.

Then the two parents start discussing the past, with Sloane wondering how they got so far apart. There are some really dumb jokes here (“You were a dazzler! A big old S-T-D! Oops, I mean S-T-U-D!”) and Raven is clearly uncomfortable. It might be the most realistic scene in the show. Twenty years ago, my parents would definitely have loved to steal the idea of this scene just to make me uncomfortable.

We go into a performance of “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” that closely hews to the original. Some of the original’s guitars are replaced by horns, but that’s really the only change to the music. And Sloane makes some sarcastic comments in response to some of Falco’s opening remarks that are actually not new to this show (They also appear on Meat Loaf’s Live around the World recording and apparently have been mainstays for many years.) but aren’t in the original. Even the baseball announcing is still here, though someone seemingly uncredited performs it instead of it being the Phil Rizzuto recording.

But Rob Fowler and Sharon Sexton are absolute magic. They both have great voices (Sexton in particular), but it really has to do with their chemistry and energy. They absolutely tear the house down. Six years later, they are still working together regularly but now as a married couple, which explains the chemistry.

Again, because the song is so much the same as the original, there just isn’t much to say about it, but I actually prefer this to the original. Phil Rizzuto is gone, and fewer Yankees makes anything better. But it’s really just how much Fowler and Sexton just seem to be having the time of their lives doing this together that makes it work. I can’t explain what it is about their vocals here that makes it sound like that, but it really does, and it makes the entire song sell even better than it did the first time.

Its context in the musical also draws some attention to what the song is actually about. Most people see it as a celebration of a teenaged sexcapade and ignore both the opening (“I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday”) and the final part of the song (“It was long ago and it was far away/So much better than it is today”) that make it clear that it’s about an older couple looking back on that sexcapade with regret.

Notes

• The dumb, crude jokes are reminiscent of many of the jokes in Dance of the Vampires. Steinman may have been more responsible for that “humor” than many of us want to admit.
• I could swear that I read somewhere during the run of the show that Andrew Polec did the baseball announcer voice, but I absolutely cannot find that now. I don’t know if that’s a false memory or I’m just missing the source.