‘Back to the Future’ Review: The DeLorean Crash Lands on Broadway

The brand-extension musical is a troublesome style to sport, demanding one thing new for newcomers but constancy for followers. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” didn’t.) “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based mostly on the primary of the time-travel movies within the billion-dollar franchise, faces an extra hurdle: It hinges on a star efficiency that might appear to be irreproducible onstage.

And by star, I in fact imply the automobile.

So, good news: In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday on the Winter Garden Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size duplicate thereof, is terrific — in some methods extra thrilling than the one within the motion pictures as a result of it does its methods stay.

Well, partly stay. The time-warping, plutonium-powered pleasure rides that shuttle younger Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 within the automobile retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are artful illusions combining mechanical motion, busy projections and quite a lot of distraction with fog, lights and sound.

Alas, that additionally describes the remainder of the present, directed by John Rando with Doc-like frenzy: mechanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though massive, it’s much less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable memento.

Certainly the musical’s guide, by Bob Gale, sticks as near his 1985 screenplay (written with Robert Zemeckis, the film’s director) as stagecraft and current-day style allow. The Libyans who threaten Doc Brown are gone, swapped for radiation poisoning, which as but has no defenders.

But Marty remains to be the identical annoyed would-be rock ’n’ curler, caught in cookie-cutter, Reagan-era Hill Valley, Calif. — and, worse, in a household of beaten-down losers. When Doc’s DeLorean by chance transports {the teenager} to 1955, in the course of the precise week during which George McFly (his patsy father) and Lorraine (his boozing mom) fell in love at a highschool dance, his presence threatens to create a causal paradox, interfering with their courtship and erasing his personal existence.

You wouldn’t anticipate the adapters to alter that; the understanding of the paradox is the very best factor in regards to the screenplay. Nor would you anticipate them to drop Doc’s unaccountably beloved catchphrase, “Great Scott,” although invoking it 13 occasions is maybe a dozen occasions too many.

Still, you would possibly hope that one thing within the musical, as an illustration music, would change the way in which the fabric lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the film and carried out by Marty at that prime faculty dance — together with Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” — are in fact efficient as ensemble alternatives. But neither they nor a lot of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, although tuneful and in a couple of circumstances rousing, do something completely different from what the film did anyway. Like Silvestri’s John Williams-y predominant title music, repurposed right here as a short overture, they’re too generic for that.

The exceptions underline the issue. One is “Gotta Start Somewhere,” a track for Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955 who we already know will run for mayor 30 years later. That good however underfed concept from the screenplay turns into a can’t-help-but-smile barnburner right here, with a traditional musical theater theme (underdog goals massive) sparking a traditional musical theater efficiency (by Jelani Remy). Similarly, “My Myopia,” the appealingly peculiar track that introduces George in 1955, creates the phantasm of depth (“My myopia is my utopia”) from a plot gap.

Rando’s staging of that quantity will not be splendid; although George (Hugh Coles) is supposedly peeping at Lorraine from a tree, it seems to be extra like he’s in a rowboat manufactured from leaves. And Lorraine (Liana Hunt) apparently misunderstands the physics of reflection as a result of she’s utilizing her open bed room window as a mirror.

It’s a uncommon visible misstep for Tim Hatley, the present’s set and costume designer, who has typically supplied astonishingly satisfying theatrical variations of the film’s settings and — with the sound designer Gareth Owen, the lighting designers Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, the video designer Finn Ross and the phantasm designer Chris Fisher — these surprisingly old school newfangled results.

The inventiveness and shock of the climactic sequence — we see Doc climbing the essential clock tower in a hilariously faux layering of stay motion behind a scrim and animation projected onto it — makes the present’s obsessive concern with faithfulness elsewhere really feel like an affordable compromise.

And but it’s probably not trustworthy. The film is rigorously balanced in tone; the musical is dialed up uniformly to 88 m.p.h. Coles, a carry-over from the 2021 London manufacturing, which received the 2022 Olivier award for finest new musical, primarily duplicates after which vastly exaggerates Crispin Glover’s already exaggerated George. Bart, too idiosyncratic merely to repeat the idiosyncrasies of the film’s Christopher Lloyd, as a substitute provides a descant of commentary atop them, typically seeming to extemporize a special present fully. And Likes, although under no circumstances harking back to the knowledgeable Michael J. Fox within the film — in tribute to whom there’s a pleasant Easter egg — is given nothing new to do besides sing, which he does very effectively.

That the issues of musical adaptation, even when solved, come to outline the manufacturing — good workarounds aren’t the identical pretty much as good work — suggests the “Why?” drawback at its coronary heart. Why, aside from the chance to rake in a gazillion extra {dollars}, make a musical out of a film that clearly doesn’t need you to?

I say that as a result of, like most pop science fiction, “Back to the Future” resists (and barely advantages from) deepening. Its plot is essentially complicated and its characters compensatorily flat — as a substitute of, ideally for a musical, the opposite method round. The film’s two hours have been barely sufficient to inform the story; to inform it in about two-and-a-half, whereas leaving room for these 17 new songs, the whole lot else has been reduce to the bone, with no room for subtlety, not to mention expressivity. Why then hassle with the songs within the first place?

Making materials shallower, even when cleverly, will not be an important argument for adaptation. It will be defended if another worth is countervailing. For me, the present’s stagecraft and common excessive spirits come closest to offering that worth, however they’re too typically undone by 1955-ish concepts of Broadway fashion (cartwheeling cheerleaders, backflipping jocks) and 1985-ish plot factors held over from the film. The Libyans could also be gone, however the story nonetheless valorizes a peeping Tom and suggests {that a} white boy launched “Johnny B. Goode” three years earlier than a Black man truly wrote it. That’s what we name a caucausal paradox.

Though a lot praised on the time of its launch and extra just lately beatified as one of many all-time greats, the film, with its implicit consumerism and win-at-all-costs ethos, has all the time struck some individuals — together with Glover — as morally hole. One of the bitter notes within the musical is the way in which it sings the identical tune. Still, on this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I’ve to confess that the automobile alone may be price a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway eager for massive objects performing viewers flyovers — and, just like the expensive departed arthritic chandelier, could also be doing so for the foreseeable future.

Back to the Future: The Musical
At the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; backtothefuturemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes.