Great Scott! It’s yet another movie-to-musical stage adaptation!
This one, “Back to the Future: The Musical,” has proven a hit in London, where it beat out “Frozen” and “Moulin Rouge” — see a theme here? — for the Olivier Award for best musical. As it revs up its first North American tour, which started in June, the show also maintains a decent speed on Broadway, if not the 88 m.p.h. that could, according to the film’s logic, send it back a few decades to when the three films in the franchise passed the $1 billion revenue threshold.
It’s fair to say that the success relies completely on longtime devotees of the films and the kids they bring with them, because this musical works only as fan service. For the critical — hey, it’s my job — there’s more pleasure to be had appreciating the nostalgia-driven joy of the audience than there is in what’s on stage, which is all frantic adrenaline.
‘Back to the Future: The Musical’
The adaptation has been driven by Bob Gale, who wrote the original screenplay and this version’s book. The music and lyrics are from Alan Silvestri, who scored the film, and Glen Ballard (“Jagged Little Pill”). Faithfulness takes top priority, so the synopsis here matches the movie.
Marty McFly (Caden Brauch) is a teenager in 1985 who inadvertently travels back in time to 1955, thanks to the mad genius Doc Brown (Don Stephenson) and his souped-up DeLorean. Marty accidentally interferes with the moment when his parents George (Burke Swanson) and Lorraine (Zan Berube) meet. That means Marty will never be born — not to mention endless other alterations to the space-time continuum — unless he can find a way to make George and Lorraine fall in love. In the meantime, Marty reunites with a younger Doc Brown to figure out his return, leading up to a climactic sequence involving the DeLorean, lightning, and a clock tower.
There are impressive stage effects here, with set designer Tim Hatley, video designer Finn Ross, and illusion designer Chris Fisher collaborating to make the car seem like it’s speeding and to go a long way towards putting filmic action sequences on stage, with a particularly clever means of depicting the climbing of the clock-tower’s staircase.
Unfortunately, it clearly isn’t possible to do in touring houses what can be done in a fixed Broadway or West End theater. The team achieves a lot with the car effects, but this version does lack a spectacular thrill that might have tipped the show into the memorable. Even now the current tech seems to be stretching capacity, as the opening-night performance had to be paused for five minutes to fix a technical glitch, which has also been reported during previews. To the production’s credit, this felt surprisingly not awkward, and those running the show know exactly how to rely on the audience’s goodwill.
The problem is that “Back to the Future: The Musical” never for a second feels like an authentic experience. There are no real emotions, no thoughtful contemplations about time, no actual suspense, not even real characters.
It’s a pleasing plastic bobble-head of a show. It shakes and swivels feverishly, and can raise an occasional smile of familiarity, but it never involves.
Except for the golden oldies borrowed from the film, the music in this musical is, to be blunt, awful. The songs come off as generic sentiments backed by commercial-sounding jingles accompanied by uninspired choreography. “This one’s for the dreamers,” sings Doc, about himself and his own song, and then reprises it later. Worse, his entrance number, “It Works,” can’t decide it if it’s a slow patter song, or an arhythmic rap, neither of which, as the title would suggest, work.
The only number that can be considered spirited, and demands vocal dexterity, “Gotta Start Somewhere,” comes from future mayor Goldie Wilson (Cartreze Tucker), and, oddly enough, could easily be cut given how disconnected it is from the story.
Although it isn’t the fault of the actors — who are clearly skilled — the performances all come across as facsimiles, not exactly imitations (with the exception of Swanson’s take on Crispin Glover) but at least tributes. Rather than Stephenson’s take on a wacky scientist, we feel like we’re getting his light take on Christopher Lloyd’s wacky scientist. And it sure doesn’t help us relate to Brauch’s Marty that his hair looks like a wig even if, perhaps, it isn’t.
Director John Rando gets completely lost in between sincerity and camp, ending up with neither. The former, in this case, would have been the way to go.
