The brand-extension musical is a tricky style to recreation, demanding one thing new for newcomers but constancy for followers. (“Hairspray” succeeded; “Frozen” didn’t.) “Again to the Future: The Musical,” based mostly on the primary of the time-travel movies within the billion-dollar franchise, faces a further hurdle: It hinges on a star efficiency that will appear to be irreproducible onstage.
And by star, I after all imply the automobile.
So, excellent news: In the Broadway adaptation, which opened on Thursday on the Winter Backyard Theater, the famously souped-up DeLorean DMC, or a life-size reproduction thereof, is terrific — in some methods extra thrilling than the one within the films as a result of it does its methods dwell.
Properly, partly dwell. The time-warping, plutonium-powered pleasure rides that shuttle younger Marty McFly (Casey Likes) between 1985 and 1955 within the car retrofitted by the eccentric Doc Brown (Roger Bart) are artful illusions combining mechanical motion, busy projections and loads 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. Although giant, it’s much less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable memento.
Actually the musical’s e book, 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.
However 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 accident transports {the teenager} to 1955, in the course of the actual week through 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 figuring out of the paradox is the most effective factor concerning the screenplay. Nor would you anticipate them to drop Doc’s unaccountably beloved catchphrase, “Nice Scott,” although invoking it 13 instances is probably a dozen instances too many.
Nonetheless, you may hope that one thing within the musical, as an illustration music, would change the best way the fabric lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the film and carried out by Marty at that top college dance — together with Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” and Huey Lewis and the Information’s “The Energy of Love” — are after all efficient as ensemble alternatives. However neither they nor a lot of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, although tuneful and in just a few instances 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 quick overture, they’re too generic for that.
The exceptions underline the issue. One is “Gotta Begin Someplace,” a music 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 desires massive) sparking a traditional musical theater efficiency (by Jelani Remy). Equally, “My Myopia,” the appealingly peculiar music 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 best; although George (Hugh Coles) is supposedly peeping at Lorraine from a tree, it seems extra like he’s in a rowboat made 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 usually offered 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 style newfangled results.
The inventiveness and shock of the climactic sequence — we see Doc climbing the essential clock tower in a hilariously pretend layering of dwell 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 fastidiously balanced in tone; the musical is dialed up uniformly to 88 m.p.h. Coles, a carry-over from the 2021 London manufacturing, which gained the 2022 Olivier award for greatest 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 an alternative provides a descant of commentary atop them, generally seeming to extemporize a unique present fully. And Likes, although under no circumstances paying homage to the skilled 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?” downside 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, “Again to the Future” resists (and barely advantages from) deepening. Its plot is essentially advanced and its characters compensatorily flat — as an alternative of, ideally for a musical, the opposite approach round. The film’s two hours had been barely sufficient to inform the story; to inform it in about two-and-a-half, whereas leaving room for these 17 new songs, every part else has been minimize 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 awesome argument for adaptation. It may be defended if another worth is countervailing. For me, the present’s stagecraft and basic excessive spirits come closest to offering that worth, however they’re too typically undone by 1955-ish concepts of Broadway type (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.
Although a lot praised on the time of its launch and extra lately beatified as one of many all-time greats, the film, with its implicit consumerism and win-at-all-costs ethos, has at all times struck some folks — together with Glover — as morally hole. One of many bitter notes within the musical is the best way it sings the identical tune. Nonetheless, on this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I’ve to confess that the automobile alone is perhaps price a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway eager for giant objects performing viewers flyovers — and, just like the expensive departed arthritic chandelier, could also be doing so for the foreseeable future.
Again to the Future: The Musical
On the Winter Backyard Theater, Manhattan; backtothefuturemusical.com. Operating time: 2 hours 35 minutes.
