Welcome to Hill Valley! Marty McFly is a rock 'n' roll teenager who is accidentally transported back to 1955 in a time-travelling DeLorean invented by his friend, Dr. Emmett Brown. But before he can return to 1985, Marty must make sure his high school-aged parents fall in love in order to save his own existence. Based on the beloved film of the same name, Back to the Future is directed by John Rando. Set your destination time, New York and get ready to make musical theater history.
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.
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.
Rush Tickets:
Price: $40
Where: Rush tickets will be available every day when the Winter Garden Theatre box office opens, on a first-come, first-served basis.
Limit: Two per customer.
Restrictions: Seat locations and the number of tickets available are subject to availability and determined at the discretion of the box office.
Digital Lottery:
Price: $45
Where: https://rush.telecharge.com/
When: The digital lottery opens at 12AM ET one day before the performance and winners are drawn at 10AM ET and 3PM ET that same day.
Limit: Two per customer
Information: Tickets are non-transferable and subject to availability.
2021 | West End |
West End Premiere West End |
2021 | West End |
West End |
2023 | Broadway |
Original Broadway Production Broadway |
2024 | US Tour |
North American Tour US Tour |
Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
---|---|---|---|
2024 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Featured Performer in a Broadway Musical | Roger Bart |
2024 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Lead Performer in a Broadway Musical | Casey Likes |
2024 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Lighting Design (Broadway or Off-Broadway) | Tim Lutkin |
2024 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Sound Design (Broadway or Off-Broadway) | Gareth Owen |
2024 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | Outstanding Video/Projections (Broadway or Off-Broadway) | Finn Ross |
2024 | Tony Awards | Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical | Roger Bart |
2024 | Tony Awards | Best Scenic Design of a Musical | Tim Hatley |
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