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

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    The addition of 17 songs turns the 1985 sci-fi classic into a big “why?” musical with a big wow factor.The brand-extension musical is a tough genre to game, demanding something new for newcomers yet fidelity for fans. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” did not.) “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the first of the time-travel films in the billion-dollar franchise, faces an additional hurdle: It hinges on a star performance that would seem to be irreproducible onstage.And by star, I of course mean the car.So, good news: 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.Certainly the musical’s book, by Bob Gale, sticks as close to his 1985 screenplay (written with Robert Zemeckis, the movie’s director) as stagecraft and current-day taste permit. The Libyans who threaten Doc Brown are gone, swapped for radiation poisoning, which as yet has no defenders.But Marty is still the same frustrated would-be rock ’n’ roller, stuck in cookie-cutter, Reagan-era Hill Valley, Calif. — and, worse, in a family of beaten-down losers. When Doc’s DeLorean accidentally transports the teenager to 1955, during the exact week in which George McFly (his patsy father) and Lorraine (his boozing mother) fell in love at a high school dance, his presence threatens to create a causal paradox, interfering with their courtship and erasing his own existence.Roger Bart, left, as Doc Brown and Casey Likes as Marty McFly with a life-size replica of the souped-up DeLorean DMC from the film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t expect the adapters to change that; the working out of the paradox is the best thing about the screenplay. Nor would you expect them to drop Doc’s unaccountably beloved catchphrase, “Great Scott,” though invoking it 13 times is perhaps a dozen times too many.Still, you might hope that something in the musical, for instance music, would change the way the material lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the movie and performed by Marty at that high school dance — including Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” — are of course effective as ensemble opportunities. But neither they nor most of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, though tuneful and in a few cases rousing, do anything different from what the movie did anyway. Like Silvestri’s John Williams-y main title music, repurposed here as a brief overture, they are too generic for that.The exceptions underline the problem. One is “Gotta Start Somewhere,” a song for Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955 who we already know will run for mayor 30 years later. That nice but underfed idea from the screenplay becomes a can’t-help-but-smile barnburner here, with a classic musical theater theme (underdog dreams big) sparking a classic musical theater performance (by Jelani Remy). Similarly, “My Myopia,” the appealingly peculiar song that introduces George in 1955, creates the illusion of depth (“My myopia is my utopia”) from a plot hole.Rando’s staging of that number is not ideal; though George (Hugh Coles) is supposedly peeping at Lorraine from a tree, it looks more like he’s in a rowboat made of leaves. And Lorraine (Liana Hunt) apparently misunderstands the physics of reflection because she’s using her open bedroom window as a mirror.It’s a rare visual misstep for Tim Hatley, the show’s set and costume designer, who has generally provided astonishingly satisfying theatrical versions of the movie’s settings and — with the sound designer Gareth Owen, the lighting designers Tim Lutkin and Hugh Vanstone, the video designer Finn Ross and the illusion designer Chris Fisher — those surprisingly old-fashioned newfangled effects.The inventiveness and surprise of the climactic sequence — we see Doc climbing the crucial clock tower in a hilariously fake layering of live action behind a scrim and animation projected onto it — makes the show’s obsessive concern with faithfulness elsewhere feel like a cheap compromise.And yet it’s not really faithful. The movie is carefully balanced in tone; the musical is dialed up uniformly to 88 m.p.h. Coles, a carry-over from the 2021 London production, which won the 2022 Olivier award for best new musical, essentially duplicates and then vastly exaggerates Crispin Glover’s already exaggerated George. Bart, too idiosyncratic merely to copy the idiosyncrasies of the movie’s Christopher Lloyd, instead adds a descant of commentary atop them, sometimes seeming to extemporize a different show entirely. And Likes, though not at all reminiscent of the expert Michael J. Fox in the movie — in tribute to whom there’s a nice Easter egg — is given nothing new to do except sing, which he does very well.Jelani Remy, center, as Goldie Wilson, a janitor in 1955, performing “Gotta Start Somewhere.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat the problems of musical adaptation, even when solved, come to define the production — good workarounds are not the same as good work — suggests the “Why?” problem at its heart. Why, other than the opportunity to rake in a gazillion more dollars, make a musical out of a movie that clearly does not want you to?I say that because, like most pop science fiction, “Back to the Future” resists (and barely benefits from) deepening. Its plot is necessarily complex and its characters compensatorily flat — instead of, preferably for a musical, the other way around. The movie’s two hours were barely enough to tell the story; to tell it in about two-and-a-half, while leaving room for those 17 new songs, everything else has been cut to the bone, with no room for subtlety, let alone expressivity. Why then bother with the songs in the first place?Making material shallower, even if cleverly, is not a great argument for adaptation. It can be defended if some other value is countervailing. For me, the show’s stagecraft and general high spirits come closest to providing that value, but they are too often undone by 1955-ish ideas of Broadway style (cartwheeling cheerleaders, backflipping jocks) and 1985-ish plot points held over from the movie. The Libyans may be gone, but the story still valorizes a peeping Tom and suggests that a white boy introduced “Johnny B. Goode” three years before a Black man actually wrote it. That’s what we call a caucausal paradox.Though much praised at the time of its release and more recently beatified as one of the all-time greats, the movie, with its implicit consumerism and win-at-all-costs ethos, has always struck some people — including Glover — as morally hollow. One of the sour notes in the musical is the way it sings the same tune. Still, in this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I have to admit that the car alone might be worth a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway longing for large objects performing audience flyovers — and, like the dear departed arthritic chandelier, may be doing so for the foreseeable future.Back to the Future: The MusicalAt the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; backtothefuturemusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Back to the Future’ on Broadway: Buckle Your (DeLorean) Seatbelt

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      If he could go back in time and do it again, Bob Gale probably wouldn’t change much about “Back to the Future.” This 1985 science-fiction comedy, about a teenager taking a whirlwind trip to the year 1955 in a time-traveling DeLorean built by an eccentric inventor, became an endearing and endlessly quotable box-office smash.The film, which Gale wrote with its director, Robert Zemeckis, also turned into a cultural phenomenon. It bonded its stars, Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, to their quirky characters and spawned two hit sequels that its creators envisioned as a self-contained saga.When the words “The End” appeared onscreen in “Back to the Future Part III,” Gale explained in a recent interview over lunch, it was a message to audiences. “We told the story we wanted to tell,” he said. “And we’re not going to milk you guys for a substandard sequel.”But like its emblematic DeLorean, the “Back to the Future” franchise has continued to reappear in the ensuing decades, in authorized books, games and theme park rides, in cast reunions and countless pop-cultural homages.The gang’s all here: Doc Brown, Marty McFly and, at the center of some of the show’s much-anticipated stunts, a replica of the DeLorean time machine.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesAnd now on Broadway: “Back to the Future: The Musical,” which opens Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, follows a story that will be familiar to fans of the film. Using a time machine devised by Doc Brown, Marty McFly travels to 1955, meets his parents Lorraine and George as teenagers and must help them fall in love after he disrupts the events that led to their romantic coupling.On its yearslong path to Broadway, “Back to the Future” has faced some challenges that are common to musical adaptations and others unique to this property.While the show’s creators sought actors to play the roles indelibly associated with the stars of the film and decided which of the movie’s famous scenes merited musical numbers, they were also trying to figure out how the stage could accommodate the fundamental elements of “Back to the Future” — like, say, a plutonium-powered sports car that can traverse the space-time continuum.Now this “Back to the Future” arrives on Broadway with some steep expectations: After a tryout in Manchester, England, its production at the Adelphi Theater in London’s West End won the 2022 Olivier Award for best new musical. The show also carries a heavy price tag — it is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Throughout its development process, the people behind it — including several veterans of the “Back to the Future” series — tried to remain true to the spirit of the films and keep intact a story that has held up for nearly 40 years.Bob Gale, who wrote the original movie with Robert Zemeckis, said of the stage adaptation: “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We just want to make the wheel smooth.”Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesAs Gale, now 72, put it: “We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. We just want to make the wheel smooth.”But, he added, “It cannot be a slavish adaptation of the movie. Because if that’s what people want to see, they should stay home and watch the movie. Let’s use the theater for what theater can do.”Gale’s inspiration for “Back to the Future” came in 1980 after seeing a photo of his father as a teenager in an old high-school yearbook, and he has become a passionate custodian of the franchise. That role dates back to at least 1989, the year a notorious “Back to the Future” Nintendo game was released. “One of the worst games ever,” he said. “I was so horrified by that I actually gave interviews to tell people, ‘Do not buy it.’”In 2005, after Zemeckis and his wife, Leslie, attended a performance of the Broadway musical “The Producers,” the “Back to the Future” creators began to contemplate a stage adaptation of their film. They hired Alan Silvestri, who wrote the scores of the “Back to the Future” movies, to create new songs with Glen Ballard, the pop songwriter who had worked with Silvestri on Zemeckis’s 2004 film version of “The Polar Express.”Gale said that as he and Zemeckis started to meet with Broadway producers, “They said all the right things. But their agenda really was, let’s get Zemeckis and Gale off this and give it to our own people to do it.”That was something Gale said he would never allow to happen. “These characters are like my family,” he said. “You don’t sell your kids into prostitution.”Instead they enlisted the British producer Colin Ingram, whom Ballard had worked with on the musical adaptation of the film “Ghost.” They hired the highly sought-after director Jamie Lloyd, and then parted ways with him in 2014. “The creative differences and the chemistry just didn’t work,” Ingram said. (Through a press representative, Lloyd confirmed that his departure was a mutual decision over creative differences but declined to comment further.)Behind the scenes: The show’s designer, Tim Hatley, was charged with evoking the spirit of the beloved film.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesNina Westervelt for The New York TimesUpon regrouping, the creators met with John Rando, who had directed “Urinetown” and “The Wedding Singer.” Rando said that after their initial meeting, “I grabbed Bob by the shoulders, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Bob, I love these characters. And I promise you I’m going to take really good care of them.’” Within a half-hour Rando said he got the call that he was hired.In conceiving “Back to the Future” for the stage, Gale said certain signature moments from the movie could never work: No scene of Doc Brown being attacked by disgruntled Libyan terrorists. (Now Marty speeds off in the DeLorean after Doc is overcome by radiation poisoning.) No set piece in which Marty races through the town square on a skateboard while the meathead bully Biff pursues him in a convertible. (Now the chase occurs on foot at school.) No pet dog named Einstein for Doc Brown. (Sorry, there’s just no dog.)A scene from the film where Biff is stopped before he can assault Lorraine remains in the show, though Gale acknowledged that this moment was “edgy.”“We want the audience to feel the jeopardy, and they do,” Gale said, adding that there were many elements from “Back to the Future” that might not withstand scrutiny if the film were being pitched today.Yet other familiar scenes presented opportunities for invention. Silvestri said he and Ballard were not given an exacting road map for where songs should go or what they should sound like. “We just kept trying to find our way,” Silvestri said. “It’s calling for a song here. It’s demanding music there.”The composers felt there had to be a rousing opening number to establish the show’s popped-collared, neon-colored version of the year 1985 and use the “Back to the Future” fanfare, and that became the song “It’s Only a Matter of Time.” There also had to be a love song for the smitten young Lorraine to serenade the enigmatic visitor she doesn’t realize is her own son, which yielded the doo-wop pastiche “Pretty Baby.”The curtain has lifted on “Back to the Future: The Musical,” but the creators of the franchise said they have no intention of pursuing more films.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesThroughout the show’s development, there was a consensus that high-tech engineering and video projections would help recreate complicated scenes like Doc Brown’s perilous ascent of the Hill Valley clock tower during a fateful lightning storm.But Rando said he entrusted these elements to the show’s designer, Tim Hatley, and his production colleagues while the book, songs and performances were being nailed down.“They would keep asking me, ‘Hey, let’s talk about the clock tower sequence,’” Rando explained. “And I said, ‘Not until we get this musical right.’ And we would do readings and readings, and then finally there was a moment where we’re like, OK, now we can do it.”The actor Roger Bart, who has starred in musical comedies like “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein,” was an early candidate to play Doc Brown. He landed the role with the help of a video audition in which he wore a lampshade on his head (to mimic a mind-reading device Brown uses) and sung the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime.”Though Christopher Lloyd is associated with the Doc Brown character, Bart said he felt it was not his job to copy that performance.“I’m 60,” Bart said. “There’s a certain point where I have to go, I know I’m entertaining. I’ve been in front of enough audiences to know that. If you really get bogged down with that thinking, you’re going to paralyze yourself.”The best way to play Doc Brown, Bart said, is to honor the spirit of Lloyd’s performances, “which is to create the idea that anything can happen at any moment, by being unusual in your choices.”Casey Likes joined the show as Marty for its Broadway run, after making his Broadway debut last year in “Almost Famous.” He said that his mother often compared him to Michael J. Fox when he was growing up. (The actor, who is 21, was born 16 years after “Back to the Future” was released in theaters.)At his audition, Likes said, “I wanted to convey something that was reminiscent of Michael but not an impression.”He added, “I went with the kind of vocal inflections that he had done, while trying to deliver the bright-eyed, somewhere between cool and dorky thing that he did. And I guess it worked.”As the curtain goes up on this “Back to the Future,” its creators are hopeful that it is a faithful representation of the franchise — one that they say they have no intention of continuing cinematically. As Gale put it, “We don’t need ‘Back to the Future 18.’”For its stars, their day-to-day hopes are more focused on steeling their courage when they step into the show’s mechanical DeLorean and trusting it will execute its stunts consistently.With a wry chuckle, Bart said he’d rather not have a day of work that ends with anyone “being sent to the hospital while the stage managers say, ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I called that wrong,’ and you go, ‘Oh, it’s OK, I have insurance, it’s all good.’ I don’t ever want to have that conversation.” More

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      ‘Back to the Future’ Musical to Open on Broadway Next Summer

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      The show, now in London, has a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts. Performances will begin on June 30.Filmdom’s most famous DeLorean is getting ready to park itself on Broadway.A musical adaptation of the hit 1985 film “Back to the Future” is planning to open on Broadway next summer, its producers announced Friday. (Look at your calendar: Friday is Oct. 21, which is when devoted fans celebrate “Back to the Future Day.”)The musical, with a creative team that combines veterans of the film with some Broadway stalwarts, has already had a life in Britain.It had an ill-timed opening at the Manchester Opera House on March 11, 2020; that production closed a few days later because of the coronavirus pandemic. The show then transferred to London last fall, where it has had much better luck: It won this year’s Olivier Award for best new musical, and it is still running at the Adelphi Theater.The beloved science-fiction film, about a teenager who travels back in time in a DeLorean and disrupts the lives of his future parents, spawned sequels and a variety of spinoff ventures, and also contributed to the fame of its star, Michael J. Fox.“Back to the Future: The Musical” features a book by Bob Gale, the screenwriter who co-wrote and co-produced all three films, and songs by Alan Silvestri, who composed the film’s score, as well as Glen Ballard, a record producer and songwriter. The musical also includes pop songs featured in the film, including “The Power of Love.”The director is John Rando, who in 2002 won a Tony Award for “Urinetown.”Two members of the London cast have signed on to reprise their roles on Broadway: Roger Bart as the inventor Doc Brown, and Hugh Coles as George McFly, the protagonist’s father. Casting for the main role, of the teenager Marty McFly, has not yet been announced.The musical is scheduled to begin performances June 30 and to open Aug. 3 at the Winter Garden Theater, which is now home to a starry revival of “The Music Man” that is planning to close Jan. 1.The musical, with Colin Ingram as its lead producer, is being capitalized for $23.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.Gale, who has been working on projects related to “Back to the Future” for more than four decades and is the de facto guardian of the franchise, said he is delighted to finally be working on Broadway, more than 15 years after Leslie Zemeckis, the wife of the film’s director Robert Zemeckis, saw “The Producers” and suggested “Back to the Future” could also be musicalized. “Broadway is the gold standard — musical theater was really invented there — and I’m delighted that we are finally going to get our shot on the Great White Way,” Gale said.Gale said the creative team has been making tweaks to the script and the set as it prepares for a Broadway run, incorporating lessons from the productions in England. They are small changes, he said, “but little things add up.”“One thing people appreciate about the movie: the more they watch, the more details they see,” he said. More

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      Review: Billy Crystal Carries the Tune in ‘Mr. Saturday Night’

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      In a mishmash new musical based on his 1992 movie, he charms the audience as a has-been comic reconnecting with family.On the heels of “City Slickers,” just a few years after “When Harry Met Sally,” Billy Crystal was at the apex of his film stardom when he made the 1992 movie “Mr. Saturday Night.” If you watch it now, you can see why it flopped, not least because Crystal was playing against type as Buddy Young Jr., a ruthlessly selfish has-been comic with a vicious streak.At the time, Crystal was in his 40s; for much of the film, Buddy is in his 70s. And Crystal embodied him with a middle-aged comedian’s idea of that later phase of life: under old-guy makeup so egregious that viewers couldn’t possibly suspend disbelief, and with the physical mannerisms of an ancient — like Miracle Max, Crystal’s indelible elder from “The Princess Bride,” but without the charm.Three decades later, Crystal too is in his 70s, and in the new musical comedy “Mr. Saturday Night,” which opened on Wednesday night, he slips much more naturally into Buddy’s skin. As a piece of theater, the show is a bit of a mess; the jokes, even some of the hoary ones, work better than the storytelling, and the acting styles are all over the place. Still, it makes for a diverting evening — because it will almost surely make you laugh, and because of how acutely tuned into the audience Crystal is.Ad-libbing his way through the script, fine-tuning the funniness, he feeds off the energy of the crowd at the Nederlander Theater. Like Buddy, who mopes around his New York apartment in a tragic cardigan, lamenting the gigs he’s been reduced to taking — the morning slot at a retirement center is, after all, no comedian’s dream — Crystal is utterly in his element performing live. If you are a fan of his, or simply someone who has missed that kind of symbiosis between actor and audience, it’s a pleasure to watch.The musical, though, is an ungainly beast, by turns zany and sentimental. Directed by John Rando, with a mood-setting score by Jason Robert Brown (music) and Amanda Green (lyrics) that goes vocally easy on its star, it has a book by the film’s screenwriters, Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel. Less cynical and more hopeful than the movie, it gives us a Buddy who is still cruel but not so callous, and thus a better candidate for our sympathy.That’s despite the myriad ways in which he has failed his brother, Stan (the immensely likable David Paymer, an Academy Award nominee for the same role in the film), who has sacrificed his own ambitions to be Buddy’s manager; his wife, Elaine (Randy Graff, stymied by an almost total lack of chemistry with Crystal), who has put Buddy first for half a century; and their daughter, Susan (Shoshana Bean, in a beautifully calibrated performance), who at 40 has been justifiably angry with her father since she was 5.David Paymer, left, as Buddy’s brother and Randy Graff, right, as his wife.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Mr. Saturday Night” traces Buddy’s second chance at life and fame, set creakily in motion one night in 1994, when he catches the in memoriam montage on the Emmy Awards broadcast and sees his own face and name appear right after John Candy’s. Buddy gets booked on the “Today” show to crack wise about the error.As his career wobbles toward possible resuscitation, he gradually notices that he’s been a schmuck to the people who love him. “Hurt them” is the command he has always used to psych himself up before he goes onstage, but however many audiences he’s killed, he’s done lasting harm at home.In the film, the brothers’ relationship is paramount. In the musical, the father-daughter fracture comes to the fore, while Elaine — whose only solo, a fantasy about going to Tahiti, is the show’s most cuttable song — is again strikingly under-imagined. (The six-piece orchestra, which sounds terrific, is conducted by David O.)“Mr. Saturday Night” means to be a valentine to both the bonds of family and the comedians of a bygone age — pros like Buddy, who got his big break in the 1940s at a Catskills resort and hosted a hit TV show on Saturday nights in the ’50s, before he blew a hole in his career with his loose-cannon arrogance.The costume designers, Paul Tazewell and Sky Switser, have their silliest fun dressing Buddy’s wacky sidekicks — Joey (Jordan Gelber), Bobby (Brian Gonzales) and Lorraine (Mylinda Hull) — for the musical’s ’50s flashbacks. A singing, dancing pack of cigarettes, anyone? (The choreography is by Ellenore Scott.)As for Crystal’s singing, he doesn’t have the range to play Fanny Brice, but he doesn’t need to. He does OK. Paymer, in Stan’s one emotional outburst set to music, kind of, sort of, almost approaches singing but doesn’t have those chops. Which works on a meta level, because Buddy is the brother who’s at ease onstage.What’s surprising is how unpersuasive the show is when the principals play decades-younger versions of their characters — a transformation that in theater, so much less literal a medium than film, can require no more than an altered demeanor. Bean is the only one to tap into that simplicity.Shoshana Bean as Susan, Buddy’s estranged daughter, in the musical, which is based on a 1992 film.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut most of the show unfolds in 1994. By then, Buddy’s old sidekicks are fixtures at the Friars Club, and so is he. Though if Lorraine is a member, she must be a relatively recent one; in the real world, the Friars Club of New York admitted its first female member, Liza Minnelli, in 1988.This is where nostalgia gets tricky. That boys’ club territoriality is the backdrop to an encounter at the Friars that the authors have kept largely, and unwisely, unchanged from the movie: when Buddy, expecting a powerful male agent to join him for lunch, is met instead by a smart young female agent, Annie (a sunny Chasten Harmon, who has a fizzy chemistry with Crystal).Annie, who will prove to be a godsend for Buddy, handles comics for a major agency. Yet she has never heard of any of the comedy greats whose names he fires off at her in a bullying pop quiz, or even, apparently, of the Friars Club — implausible for an industry professional, and almost impossible so soon after the Friars’ infamous 1993 roast of Whoopi Goldberg. Annie is written as ignorant just so that Buddy can school her, which carries a strong whiff of dinosaur on the authors’ part.Of course, Buddy himself is a caveman. When his old pals called him and Elaine “Fred and Wilma” — as they did, affectionately, at the performance I saw, Crystal not being the only one enlivening the script with variations — it was funny because it’s true.But Buddy does want to evolve, at least a little. If his epiphany about his need to change seems to arrive out of nowhere, buoyed by piano and brass in a lovely, impassioned solo, we root for his redemption anyway.This is a musical that wants its guy to get a happy ending. Despite all of the show’s faults, and all of Buddy’s, it turns out that so do we.Mr. Saturday NightAt the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; mrsaturdaynightonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes. More