BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE MUSICAL
Book by Bob Gale
Music & Lyrics by Alan Silvestri & Glen Ballard
Based on the film, screenplay by Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale
Starring Roger Bart and Casey Likes
Directed by John Rando
Wintergarden Theatre
Official Website
Reviewed by David Spencer
Lest I bury the lead, this will not be an altogether bad review; it may even be a good one. Bear with me through my preamble.
I think of an item like Back to the Future as a Hollywood-head musical (HHM). The paradigm for the HHM is built upon the premise that the source movie’s screenwriters (which may include the director, though in this case does not) can generate a worthy musical by eschewing authorship-collaboration with properly trained (if not seasoned) musical theatre professionals; by instead doing it themselves and bringing in their film-score or pop-score buddies to provide songs. What usually makes the HHM so smug and so heinous is that it refuses to recognize (lip service respect aside), that musicals are not just a different form, but involve a different craft. (One of the primary reasons why theatrical-bred writers are able to migrate to film successfully is that they learn, may have already learned—or in a pinch understand that they’re going to be learning—the building blocks of a different medium, and know how to bring their craft to bear within it. When Disney’s resurgence as a force in animated musicals began, after a long fallow period, they were smart enough to make Howard Ashman their guru.)
Not all HHMs make it to Broadway; not all intend to (Happy Days, Gilligan’s Island). When they do, there’s a factor other than craft-competence keeping it alive (in the case of Victor/Victoria, for example, it was the opportunity to see Julie Andrews recreate her film role).
The net result of the HHM is a pale simulacrum of the original property. One based on a film will approximate the screenplay structure and try to recreate signature moments as totems for the audience to recognize. But there’s always a cheapening, and it tends to happen in the score. The songs don’t carry the story forward (not more than an inch or so anyway) and usually celebrate or explicate something we already know from the film or that are self-evident from the set-up. A song exists as filler for the novelty of having a song in that recognizable spot; and always-always-always its music is generic: relevant perhaps to the general time period, geographical setting and mood—like French-sounding music for Paris—variously up-tempo (happy) or ballady (wistful or sad) as warranted—but it’s almost never authentically character-and-theme idiosyncratic; a song whose vocabulary is so unique that it could be sung by no one else ever in any other show.
In other words: the HHM tends to be a theme park event exploiting its source material less for its potential to be deepened or to enhance its emotional power…than for the ability to hit its pop culture recognition triggers.
All this said (and here’s the lead): There’s a degree to which Back to the Future gets away with this far more effectively than any other HHM I’ve ever seen.
And why?
Because in its native state, as a film, Back to the Future has the elements of theme park built into the matrix: time travel, extreme characterization, science fiction/fantasy special effects, the Delorean…
The authorship of the musical—original co-screenwriter Bob Gale, original film composer Alan Silvestri (co-lyricist) and, newly along for the ride, pop songwriter Glen Ballard—don’t have the skill-set for going classic-musical deep, but they know what the source material gives them to work with, and have the background of a film trilogy (let’s not forget 2 and 3) to have taught them, over decades of screenings and fandom, the promise that the audience expects their musical revamp to fulfill. So they’ve written their show to do that.
Director John Rando has done the rest.
He has encouraged his cast to riff upon the familiar as a way of claiming their own territory: The Marty McFly of Casey Likes is just enough like Michael J. Fox to shorthand to the audience that he’s the Marty they love. Roger Bart’s Doc Brown is his own take, in a way, but wigs and costumes match the Christopher Lloyd iconography, and Bart knows how to milk his own brand of eccentricity for the crowd. And together, he and Likes have perfected the timing of a classic comedy team. The rest of the cast are likewise firmly within the film templates, likewise not imitating, but the roles are so extreme that simply playing them puts the cast in the zone of recognition.
And while no expense has been spared on the special effects, Rando understands that live theatre is not film, so his trick, similarly, is not to imitate, but to replicate in such a way that the art of stage magic (misdirection and built illusion) takes the place of CGI; a little how the hell did they do that? goes a long way.
And add to all this—
—the winking.
There are moments, more than a few, where without dialogue to mark it, just a pause, a take, a look purposefully cast beyond the proscenium arch, a something, the folks onstage acknowledge to us in the audience, who’ve all seen the movie, that we know what’s coming (or what’s been discovered) as well as they do, and isn’t it fun that we’re all in on it? Together?
And if Back to the Future was a “real” musical, this would be a violation of verisimilitude, a cheap way of getting a laugh or applause.
But it’s not a real musical. It’s a theme park musical.
And everybody knows it’s a theme park musical.
They know it. You know it. And they know you know. And you know they know you know.
And if you can’t wink at, in or about a theme park, how theme-parky can it be?
To be sure, Back to the Future is an “eye of the beholder” theme park, and as an audience member you either respond to the triggers, or make a pact with the rules of the game, or (perhaps only if you’re a critic) recognize what’s going on and acknowledge it, even without entirely endorsing the idea of it.
Or you don’t.
And if you feel as if you won’t, you shouldn’t attend.
And if you feel as if you might, you should.