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From an interview with Stephen Collins:
I was asked to join a small company of actors at a summer theater on Martha's Vineyard, the Island Repertory Theater. The artistic director of IRT was Gordon Stewart, who had taught drama at Amherst that year, and who'd been very successful with IRT the summer before. One of the plays Gordon chose for the summer of 1968 was a Jim Steinman original musical based on Bertolt Brecht's first play, "Baal".
Jim wrote the book and adapted it into a rock musical, with a terrific score (bits of which show up in later Steinman songs on "Bat Out of Hell", as well as Jim's songs for the Thomas Babe play, "Kid Champion".
A somewhat under-rehearsed "Baal" opened at Island Repertory Theatre in the summer of '68. I played Baal. It was promising but it didn't really work (partially, I think, because I was miscast) and the mostly adult audience in Edgartown (a mile from Chappaquiddick, where Ted Kennedy would have his famous accident a few years later) was put off by the loud music, which was played by a terrific Amherst student band, Leaves of Grass.