For those who know Meat Loaf only as the powerful singer of rock anthems like "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", it may come as a surprise that he was a serious, stage-trained actor long before he was a musical star. The Texas-born thespian landed a role on Broadway in "Hair" soon after arriving in NYC in the late 1960s and even acted in Shakespeare's "As You Like It" (in Central Park for Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival), among other non-musical plays. But it was his voice, a bombastic mixture of rock and opera, that earned him his best opportunities. The 1973 stage production
