Back to the Future: The Musical Broadway Reviews

Oftentimes when we get mega-musical adaptations here on Broadway, we shun them out the door and liken them to cheap theme park entertainment. It makes one wonder, why? A multi-million dollar production that packs houses and entertains audiences of all ages are what we should be welcoming right now. No one is claiming we are looking for the next Pulitzer Prize Award-winning work with every new show. Fun Home this is certainly not, but to see the thunderous cheers and screams of fans pouring out after the curtain call, who are we to say this doesn’t belong. Does Back To The Future need to be a musical? Of course not. But it makes for one helluva good night on Broadway. Diehard fans will love it, and new fans will be born — my plus one for the evening had never seen any of the films but is planning her watch party soon. Head to the Winter Garden and buckle in cause this musical will catapult you right to 88mph, and that’s a great place to be.

The show is lavish and, as directed by John Rando (Urinetown, Mr. Saturday Night), never slows down, at times coming off like something that might belong at Madison Square Garden. The whole thing is basically a big, flashy, speeding car, but it’s apt for today’s Broadway, since it combines a familiar title, a sampling of hit songs, and some slick special effects, while vaguely touching on the fantasy of changing eras in order to work things out and patch things up.

It's an odd paradox, that Back to the Future assumes prior familiarity with the film such that the players need little introduction, while positing nearly every character as worthy of substantial exploration. Chalk it up, perhaps, to the fact that two of the movie's creators are involved: Bob Gale adapted the musical's book from his and Robert Zemeckis's screenplay, and Alan Silvestri, who composed the film score, co-wrote the musical's rollicking score with Glen Ballard. They clearly know and adore all their characters, but not all audiences have the same depth of understanding, especially 28 years on from the film's premiere. But like the DeLorean climbing to the crucial 88 miles per hour, the writers ultimately succeed in building the show's momentum and narrative heft. Once Marty meets his teenaged parents, Lorraine and George, in 1955 and catches Lorraine's eye before George can, he has to course-correct — and gets to know his parents better in the process. Back to the Future is really a story about how the young can shape older generations' futures, after all, not just the other way around.

Sometimes a Broadway show just does what it needs to do, going big on songs, silliness, corn, and heart. And together those things work, even while some things frustratingly don’t work around them. The leviathan kicks into life, the audience jumps on and rides shotgun. Through the barrage of special effects, jokes, dramatic set-pieces, the stage-filling dancing and singing of the unsung heroes of the company—through all of it—the audience is visibly and audibly locked in, seduced, happy. And so, sure, Back to the Future: The Musical—at two hours forty minutes, first staged in London’s West End—is overlong (almost an hour longer than the 1985 movie it is based on) and its female characters and its straining to say something about civil rights under-drawn and underdeveloped. But the show (Winter Garden Theatre, booking to Feb 25, 2024) is also an amiably rollicking reanimation of a much-loved movie classic, and in no mood to address its flaws, which seem—ironically, given its preoccupation with time travel—stuck in another era.

It’s a terrifically fun and amusing story that works nearly as well onstage as it did on film, although the original songs, as is so often the case with these adaptations, mainly come across as superfluous. Not that they’re all that bad, mind you. Some of them are quite catchy, such as the 1950s girl group homage “Something About That Boy,” the inspirational “Gotta Start Somewhere” and the amusing “21st Century,” the last performed by Doc and the ensemble with a sort of Devo-like thing happening. The musical numbers, featuring lively choreography by Chris Bailey, are generally rousing but, as you can probably tell by the song titles, the lyrics are strictly of the generic variety.

Unfortunately, unlike the DeLorean, Back to the Future: The Musical itself never quite hits 88 miles an hour. But while the rest of the production is content to play it safe and steady, give Bart credit for always putting the pedal to the metal. After all, if you're going to throw a time machine onto a Broadway stage, why not do it with some style? Grade: B

The new musical import from London is built around the spectacle of that flying DeLorean; or at least, I imagine the show would be just another mediocre effort without the spectacular flying machine. The prop car, built by a company called Twins FX, turbocharges the audience at least four times, and deserves the waves of applause it garners. Which leads us, inevitably, to items of lesser importance like book, music, lyrics, et al. Gale, who wrote the screenplay with Robert Zemeckis (director of the original film and one of numerous coproducers of the musical), has done a respectable job of adapting it to the stage. All the film highlights seem to be here, which is to the good. As for the score by Alan Silvestri (composer of the film) and Glen Ballard (composer/lyricist of that excessively bland Ghost musical that visited the Lunt in 2012), let’s just say that it gets by; this is one of those shows with the music so brutally amplified as to make the words often impossible to comprehend.

“Back to the Future,” opening tonight on Broadway, is a nearly scene-by-scene re-creation of the 1985 movie on which it’s based. This is in some ways a lost opportunity to reimagine a story that’s as tied to a specific era as the sports car it showcases, the DeLorean, which stopped production in 1983. So it’s perhaps a tad ironic that it’s the DeLorean that redeems this musical, far more than the serviceable score or familiar choreography or competent cast. The car serves as the main vehicle for the often thrilling stage design and special effects.

The musical is good at pointing and saying, 'Look, something shiny or cool!' So if the musical dips into an underwhelming song or misfires a gag (like Marty brandishing a lightsaber in an attempt to substitute an inadaptable film quote), the production's hyperactivity and spectacle can draw you back in. Props sizzle with pyrotechnics and Finn Ross's video designs zip like '2001: Space Odyssey' stargating. Not least of all, the clocktower climax glides like cinematic crosscutting thanks to the coordinated projection and sets. 

What Back to the Future does deliver instead of commentary on the original is a beat-by-beat translation of its set pieces. The DeLorean arrives onstage at the same time as Bart’s Doc, and actor and car split the entrance applause. When Marty gets inside and guns for 88 miles per hour, the screens around the stage blur behind him. (I felt right back in that Universal Studios amusement-park ride.) You’ll perhaps notice a V-shaped set of slats in the stage, ready to ignite behind the wheels of the car, and later on, the DeLorean soars into the air for its own “Defying Gravity” moment — turns out the flying cars are here. The stagecraft is well managed (Chris Fisher, of The Cursed Child, is credited with the illusions, while Finn Ross did the video design and Hugh Vanstone the lighting), but watching the climax, where Doc and Marty race to get everything set in time for lightning to strike, I kept noticing how much the musical nearly turned into a movie. The screens, which so dominate the set, provide for cuts between Doc and Marty, the score’s basically the one you know, and the actors are really there only to sit in a car and on a ledge and shout lines you know. When the ledge under Doc crumbles, that’s a screen too. If this is the future arriving on Broadway, it looks way too much like another medium’s past.

“Back to the Future” is a technical marvel that hits all the right nostalgia buttons, and in the immortal words of Marty McFly, your kids are gonna love it. But with soulless songs that are more obligatory than earned, you can’t escape the feeling that they’re just running down the clock.

Let us raise a rousing chorus of hoorahs for the design team: Tim Hatley (set and costumes), Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone (lighting), Finn Ross (video), Gareth Owen (sound), and Chris Fisher (illusions). Together they make the magic happen. Without their tremendous skill and talent, Back to the Future would be nothing but a fairly close rehash of the movie, stuffed with too many uninspired pop tunes (music and lyrics by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard) and dance routines (choreography by Chris Bailey) that rarely rise above the level of serviceable time-fillers (though, thankfully, there is that rousing version of Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B. Goode' near the end).

The DeLorean car in the new musical “Back to the Future” is definitely more exciting than the antique roadster in “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” That musical, with songs by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, ran for a few months back in 2005, and while lackluster, it does have one thing over the new flying-car show: The Sherman brothers score is definitely more engaging than the songs Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard have written for “Back to the Future,” which opened Thursday at the Winter Garden Theatre after the show’s world premiere in the U.K. in 2020.

Still, nothing on stage here measures up to the screen version, except the obvious: The live special effects, most notably a final sequence in which 1955 Doc climbs to the top of that clock tower during a lightning storm, with Marty speeding the DeLorean through town. The lighting and video projections that have so far provided some amusement come to fruition here, and Back To The Future: The Musical finally and fully justifies its transition from screen to stage. A coda, which will bring to mind a certain Phantom chandelier or maybe a Saigon helicopter, can’t help but seem a tad anti-climactic.

In a story that hearkens back to 1955, you could wish this musical’s creators had considered what made musical theater so great in that golden era. Perhaps they might have crafted something more fresh and tuneful, with goosebump moments that come not from hydraulics but from theatrical know-how. Sometimes looking at the past with fresh eyes can lead to a new road forward, but with “Back to the Future,” time just stands still.

In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday at the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size replica thereof, is terrific — in some ways more exciting than the one in the movies because it does its tricks live. Well, partly live. The time-warping, plutonium-powered joy rides that shuttle young Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 in the vehicle retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are crafty illusions combining mechanical action, busy projections and a lot of distraction with fog, lights and sound. Alas, that also describes the rest of the show, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir.

Some will insist that the show is meant for “Back to the Future” super fans only. Well, speaking as one of those super fans who has watched the film trilogy countless times to the point of “Pledge of Allegiance”-like recitation, the musical left me cold and uninvolved. It made me want to go back… to the movie!

In the unlikely event that I find myself inside a plutonium-fueled DeLorean—I suppose today it would be a Tesla—capable of transporting me to the past, and thus enabling me to alter my future, fairly high on the list of life changes I’d consider would be somehow avoiding having to view the sluggish slog that is the stage adaptation of “Back to the Future.”

Alas, the musical constantly makes easier, cheaper choices, dropping its own aesthetic rules if it serves a joke in the moment. Bubbles appear in the house for no reason. The fourth wall is dropped and rebuilt every other scene. Nothing ever pauses for reflection, for vulnerability, for hope. Even the ballads in Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard's serviceable score feel rushed and unwilling ever to go below the surface. This thing just never breathes. At times, the wackiness is sufficiently wacky that it appeals, such as a truly bizarre dance number from Bailey that opens the second act featuring Bart and a bunch of weirdly clad dancers doing god knows what.

So, in summary: a gifted cast with thankless roles, a hokey book that takes no chances, and an abysmal score that drags everything down. All that’s left is spectacle. And let’s be honest; the car is the star. Designed by Tim Hatley, lit by Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, and given bleeps, bloops and sonic booms by Gareth Owen, the automotive time machine zooms to 88 mph through elaborate video front and rear projections created by Finn Ross with “illusion” effects by Chris Fisher. Looks fairly cool the first time, somewhat lame the second. For an encore, hearkening back to 2005’s Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the airborne contraption noses over the orchestra. Every generation gets the Broadway eye-candy it deserves: in the ’80s it was the chandelier; in the ’90s, the Circle of Life; in the early aughts a witch levitating on a broomstick. We get a 38-year-old gullwing DeLorean on a turntable.

Much like Rocky, its 2014 predecessor at the Winter Garden Theatre, Back to the Future gambles on name recognition and nostalgia but forgoes the basic mechanics of a successful musical: a coherent book and catchy score.

Then there are shows like Back to the Future: The Musical, whose title is something of a misnomer: This adaptation of the Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment hit about a teenager who finds himself bounced back from 1985 to 1955 is less a musical than a two-and-a-half-hour theme park ride with songs, offering as much sensory overload as an afternoon at Magic Kingdom. Indeed, the warnings that can accompany splashily high-tech productions, to pregnant women and theatergoers prone to migraines and seizures, should have been emblazoned on the playbill cover in this case. Strobe lights and other visual shenanigans, from Finn Ross’s dizzying video design to a flying car, are just the beginning; for me, the auditory assaults leveled by sound designer Gareth Owen (in conjunction with musical supervisor Nick Finlow and music director Ted Arthur, I assume) hit the hardest. Before the first act was even half over, I had crafted makeshift earplugs out of tissue paper, a trick I typically reserve for the loudest rock concerts.

What makes Back to the Future so confusing, aside from the general ineptness, is how little it seems to understand its own relationship to the material it is trying to exploit. The show spends half of its time slavishly reproducing lines and details from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 film—Likes has even been directed to imitate the catch in Michael J. Fox’s voice—and the other half treating its own story like piffle, with corny added jokes and broad metatheatrical references and gags; in a ludicrous outer-space number for Doc Brown that opens the second act, it abandons all trappings of sense altogether. A similar fate befalls too many shows that try to cash in on cinematic IP, and the Broadway musical, as an art form, can’t keep getting lost on these roads. If this is the future, please send it back.