An embarrassed Raven runs away from her parents seemingly deciding to have sex in front of her (Yeah–that seems to be what the script reads.) to her bedroom. Zahara arrives and then Falco and Sloane join her. The parents apologize for embarrassing her, but then they watch as Zahara administers a shot. They explain that they are giving her a “sleep aid.” Zahara is apparently working as a nurse at Falco Tower, explaining why Jagwire found her outside and had seen her there before. (Another Romeo & Juliet element is the importance of Juliet’s nurse, though Zahara is far less a cause of death and destruction than her predecessor.) Sloane and Falco continue to quarrel about Raven’s independence and then leave.

Strat then enters via the window. He whispers one of Steinman’s favorite bits: “If light were dark/And dark were light/The moon a black hole/In the blaze of night/A raven’s wing/As bright as tin/Then you, my love/Would be darker than sin” and kisses her. She awakens and after taking some convincing that Strat is really there, he tries out his pickup line from earlier: “On a hot summer night, would you offer your throat to the wolf with the red roses?” He’s disappointed when she ignores the line. She still isn’t sure she’s awake but explains that she can’t dream because she is given dream suppressants and so this must be real.

She talks about how depressed she feels about her current situation and Strat expresses sympathy. Then he puts her hand on his chest and says, “I want your heart to beat as fast as mine. I want to speed it up–so our bodies rhyme.”

When she responds with, “Is that your usual pickup line?” we get a reminder that she’s Sloane’s daughter too. And while this moment gives a rather different context to the lyrics, that’s when they go into the song “Making Love out of Nothing at All.”

A few piano chords, a simple synth bed, and some cymbals open in a manner reminiscent of both recordings of “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” but much softer. Then an acoustic guitar plays the recognizable main hook of the song.

Andrew Polec and Christina Bennington trade off every couple of lines, singing softly on top of the soft synth and piano chords. There are a few other synthesizer lines that sound like a music box, but that’s really all that happens throughout.

It’s a very subdued version of the song. The arrangement never grows and even the vocals don’t have the dynamics of the other recordings of the song. After the mid-song bridge, there is of course no guitar solo and then just one final repeat of the chorus. So it’s also a very short version of the song, running just over two-and-a-half minutes.

While it’s still a great melody and it still has some amazing lyrics, I think this version of “Making Love out of Nothing at All” robs it of most of what I love so much about it. It becomes a very small, very simple, very short song that honestly feels a bit out of place and like it’s merely a resting point in between two of the more exciting, high-energy numbers in the show in “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and “Bat out of Hell.”

Ranking the Versions

1. Air Supply-Making Love… The Very Best of Air Supply (original)
2. Bonnie Tyler-Free Spirit
3. Jim Steinman’s Bat out of Hell: The Musical