With Titus / Meat Loaf, Hannah Fogler's Shakespeare-and-rock experiment reaches its fourth and final installment — and it is going out the way it came in: loud, theatrical, and soaked in fake blood.
The show runs October 2 through 10 at the Baltimore Theatre Project, 45 West Preston Street, with performances October 2, 3, 4, 9, and 10, plus a special additional performance at Boordy Vineyards in Hydes on October 8. Tickets are $30 for general admission, $20 for students, teachers, and artists, and $40 for the VIP Splash Zone. The production is presented by Motte & Bailey, prod., the Baltimore company behind the series.
The premise is exactly what the title promises: Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus — his bloodiest text — welded to the music of Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman's Bat Out of Hell albums. The pairing is less arbitrary than it first sounds. Titus Andronicus is a revenge tragedy that piles rape, mutilation, murder, and cannibalism onto the stage. Bat Out of Hell was itself conceived as something close to a rock musical — Meat Loaf and Steinman pitched the material live, with Steinman at the piano and Meat Loaf singing, before a note was ever recorded. Both are maximalist works that treat excess as a virtue. Fogler's production leans into that shared sensibility rather than apologizing for it.
Motte & Bailey describes Titus / Meat Loaf as "the most ambitious project" it has tackled to date. The company promises demonic Furies, loss of life and limb, stadium-concert lighting, "an absurd amount of stage blood," and revenge "that burns so hot it comes from Hell itself." The show is part campy horror, part rock concert, and it makes no attempt to soften Shakespeare's ugliest text.
The most distinctive feature is the Splash Zone. The first few rows of the theatre — branded "The Pit" — are sold as premium seating for patrons willing to be drenched in stage blood over the course of the performance. Splash Zone ticket-holders receive a complimentary white t-shirt, explicitly intended as a wearable canvas for the blood that will fly. The company frames this as a test of "moxie," and it has built in guardrails: no one under 13 may be seated in The Pit, and no minors may sit there without a responsible adult beside them. The production carries a lengthy content advisory covering extreme violence, human sacrifice, off-stage sexual assault and continuous references to it, body mutilation on and off stage, torture, murder, cannibalism, sexuality, and references to kink and fetish culture. It is not recommended for patrons under 15, though the company adds, with characteristic cheek, that a horror-loving kid might find it "right up their alley." The show runs approximately two and a half hours with one 15-minute intermission and uses audience interaction, excessive blood effects, haze, loud sounds, and very loud music.
The cast is a who's-who of Baltimore theatre veterans, many of whom have appeared across the whole series: Lance Bankerd, Siobhan Beckett, Amy Bell, Greg Bell, Mars Bell, Emily Classen, Philip Doccolo, Gabriel Duque, TJ Flem, Hannah Fogler, J Purnell Hargrove, Bobby Harris, Stephen Hoppe, Jess Miller, Jessica Preactor, Gray Sheridan, Gage Wright, and Vexara, with live band support from Motte & Bailey's house band.
Motte & Bailey was assembled in the spring of 2024 by what its own About page calls "a rag tag band of Baltimore Theatre Veterans (they fought in the great theatre wars)." Its first production was an immersive dinner party, An Evening With The Baron, created and performed by Lance Bankerd at the Peale Museum in Baltimore. From there the company moved into cabarets, fundraisers, and full-scale productions, with a stated mission to give audiences "new and exciting experiences that they've never seen, heard, or felt before."
Fogler's Shakespeare-and-music adaptations became the company's signature. The first was Hamlet / Black Parade, which wove Shakespeare's text together with My Chemical Romance's The Black Parade and played the Mercury Theater in Station North in October 2025. It drew a review from longtime Baltimore critic J. Wynn Rousuck on WYPR, who called it "a unique musical interpretation / mash-up." Fogler described that project as one that had lived in her head for some time, and said she was "thrilled to finally be able to share it with the world."
The second installment, Caesar / Americana, followed in March 2026 at Fells Point Corner Theatre, setting Julius Caesar in an alternate post-World War I Appalachia scored with Bruce Springsteen, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Poor Man's Poison, and others. Fogler tied that one directly to her family: "My dad had a huge impact on my musical upbringing — constantly making me mix tapes and introducing me to all kinds of different music," she said. "I grew up with Springsteen, Dylan, Cash, Hank Williams, The Band, and other classic American song-writers singing me to sleep — literally." She contrasted it with Hamlet, noting that The Black Parade "speaks to a part of me that I forged on my own," while Americana "speaks to my roots."
The third, Midsummer / Bowie Elton Queen, took A Midsummer Night's Dream and set it to David Bowie, Elton John, and Queen — and became the inaugural outdoor theatre presentation at the Baltimore Peninsula, staged at Elijah's Park over two weekends in June 2026 in collaboration with the Baltimore Peninsula Partnership, with an additional outdoor performance at Boordy Vineyards. Fogler described that production as proudly queer and colorful, "filled with glitter and whimsy from asses-to-elbows," and spoke candidly about her own path: "I didn't come out as Queer until I was 30 years old, so I was well into adulthood before I got to be my whole self publicly and privately."
By the time Titus / Meat Loaf arrives, then, the series has moved from emo to Americana to glam rock to, finally, the operatic excess of Steinman and Meat Loaf — each installment pairing a different Shakespeare play with a different corner of the rock canon. The choice of Titus for the finale is telling. It is the play that most rewards the treatment the series has specialized in: a text so extreme that only a full rock-concert apparatus — shredding guitars, operatic drama, dark comedy, and a literal splash zone — can do it justice. As the company puts it, ending the four-part experiment with Titus and Meat Loaf is "the ultimate climax."
The Baltimore Theatre Project itself is a fitting host — one of the city's longest-running homes for contemporary and experimental performance, and a venue with a long history of exactly the kind of work Motte & Bailey is making. (The company's own listing gives the address as 45 W Preston St.)
For anyone who has followed the series, the finale is a chance to see where the experiment lands. For anyone who hasn't, it is a self-contained spectacle: a choir of doomed Romans belting anthems, demonic Furies, and the promise of being drenched in blood while wearing a white t-shirt you were given for precisely that purpose. Tickets can be purchased online at motteandbailey.org.