When I sat down six rows back from the stage, squeezed my lime into my seven-dollar tonic water and tore open my peanut M&M’s, it was hard to verbalise how I felt in anticipation for the curtain to rise on Back to the Future: The Musical.
Back to the Future is one of my all-time favorite films, right next to a few pretentious picks to gain myself some traction in the Letterboxd community.
It goes without even saying that after watching the first two films countless times, I was extremely biased in my viewing of this musical on its national tour at Baltimore’s very own Hippodrome Theater.
Whether or not I had some premeditated judgments, or because I was simply excited to see the legendary film come to life in some overdramatized fashion, I was brimming with excitement.
I was sitting there, thinking, “This HAS to be the line in the sand for film adaptations on Broadway. I mean, how are they going to pull off half of the effects done in the film live in front of an audience?”
(I was also probably bitter that these sorts of shows get national tours, yet the majority of the population will never get to experience Purpose, but I digress.)
When it comes to this specific musical, it is simply unmatched on a technical level. I wish there was one of those rollercoaster hidden cameras to capture my face when I saw a true-to-size souped-up DeLorean quite literally fly on stage.
The execution on the sound, lighting, set pieces and historically accurate costumes was simply masterful, and frankly left me leaving the theater wanting to go see it again but with 3D glasses.
To put it lightly, it’s one of those things you see live that truly reinforces one’s belief in the magic of live performance and theater. It exceeded my expectations in every single aspect I doubted about it.
However, it fell short in a few other categories in comparison to the movie.
Part of what fell short was what I thought the production was going to do to make up for a lack of technical effectiveness, when it was really the other way around.
(I must also note that my review of this performance must be taken with a grain of salt, seeing as though I have been mentally picking it apart in the weeks since I went to see it.)
When people think about the 1985 classic starring Michael J. Fox, Crispin Glover, Christopher Lloyd, and Lea Thompson, it probably evokes a wide variety of emotions.
Audiences consist of young people who have just viewed it for the first time, people who lived to see it in theaters, and people who simply can recognize that ’80s movie with a time machine made out of a DeLorean.
It’s one of those films that has done the perfect job of aging with me and staying true to its classic charm, but also never really changing.
The film has more plants and payoffs than anything I have ever seen and, really at its core, Back to the Future is an index card movie.
In production, the director Robert Zemeckis and his whole crew stood in the writers room and wrote major plot points on index cards and wove them all together to create this (somewhat) plot-hole-free story.
If you’ve seen it, this sort of idea really shines through in the film. Think of all the major things that have to happen in order for everything to make sense.
Marty McFly invents rock ‘n’ roll, Marty McFly invents skateboarding, Marty McFly… takes one for the team and kisses his mom? (Maybe that last one isn’t so important, but you get the idea.)
One thing this film does so perfectly in an extremely specific way (that I even have a hard time verbalising) is its nuance in showing a complex perspective of suburbia and Americana that many films of the time didn’t really grasp.
Films like Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off are iconic for a reason and harbor many of the same themes and nuances that Back to the Future holds: these dramatic-comedic stories center around American suburban families in white-picket-fence neighborhoods with perfectly trimmed grass and quirky neighbors.
All the iconic characters we know from this era are all unique and hold a level of complexity that makes the audience have an emotional, relatable connection.
The McFlys are different.
A dorky father with slicked back hair, a frustrated mother who drinks Smirnoff neat with dessert, a pitifully single daughter, a fast food worker son, and our star of the show: Marty.
Marty adopts several of the same characteristics that we see in the hero archetype. He’s slick, collected, maybe insecure, but hopeful and charismatic. He seems to be a fish out of water in his extremely dysfunctional family.
As soon as we meet Marty, we aren’t looking through rose-colored glasses. We see him as he is. Marty meets the criteria of the ’80s hero archetype, however he’s not cushioned by plot armor nor is he saved by some deus ex machina that fixes all of his problems.
When people watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, for example, they appreciate that infallible John Hughes charm. But I wonder if they can truly relate to the quirky knitwear, bright red sports cars, and carefree lifestyle the main characters have.
When we look toward Back to the Future, it feels far more grounded in reality. We get to look into a film that at its forefront is a science fiction film topped with comedic tropes, but at its core is a family drama. There are countless aspects of this film that general audiences can resonate with to such a degree that it brings them back watching it again and again.
You feel for George McFly getting pushed around by one of the most classic bullies in cinema history, Biff Tannen. You feel Marty’s sister Linda stuck in her delusional teenage dream, or simply resonating with a totaled car, a blue-collar household, or the deep fear of rejection.
With all this in mind, I knew when seeing an adaptation that some of these deep-rooted themes and subject matters must be present to deliver the same level of charm that one would get from seeing the movie for the very first time.
Ambience is key to this film, which presents the fictional Hill Valley as a world that’s so normal it almost feels like we’ve stepped into The Twilight Zone by accident. Then, somehow we see that exact energy when Marty goes back to 1955 Hill Valley with the same characters in their developmental phases.
Now that I’ve established the main points of what makes this film an absolute masterpiece, allow me to circle back to the Broadway show.
I can obviously start by saying this musical was fun. I mean it was a campy, fever dream experience, like watching High School Musical choreography mixed with a score of songs that are exactly what people think of when they imagine Musical Theater come together amidst technical bravado that would make Zemeckis re-shoot the trilogy.
The show was not done entirely wrong: nothing was butchered, and it was charming. But if this film is going to get any sort of modern adaptation, let it at least be a straight up play.
It was less about things being ruined, and more so how much these aforementioned themes and plot devices strayed from the film.
The musical took each character’s main flaw or defining feature and wrote individual songs about each of them. Marty was weirdly self aware and lost any sort of edge and grit that we get from Michael J. Fox. Biff felt like all he was about to do was take someone’s lunch money. Doc Brown was extremely mellowed out: quirky, yes, but not quite crackpot-level.
So when these classic characters who have a very set-in-stone sense of relatability for audiences start to become shells of themself, the foundation starts to crumble a little.
I will say, along with technical pieces being lovely, the sets were great. They nailed the ambience, but it felt a little gilded when the other key points around it didn’t stay true to themselves.
Some plot points were removed to adapt it for the stage, but they ended up overcompensating with extra songs and new scenes to rework the entire story. Doc Brown gets radiation poisoning instead of being shot to death by Libyan Nationalists (yes, I am fully aware the former makes far more sense) and then there becomes new dialogue, new character moments and so much that sort of overcomplicates a fairly simple story.
And just when I thought they weren’t going to sing “The Power of Love,” there was a post-curtain-call full-cast dance party situation where Doc was on a hoverboard and everyone lived (sort of) happily ever after. I’m just never in support of the “Together we are insert title ending” in really any piece of media. Yes, Back to the Future ends somewhat pleasantly, but come on guys, not like this.
As an actor myself, I am never going to go out of my way to put down any piece of theater I know good and well took eons of commitment, time, and money to produce. This is not to defer to anyone nor is it to say it was a bad adaptation, I just don’t think it was the right way to go about adapting it.
I am also ridiculously biased and nitpicky about this because, as mentioned before, the film is one of my all-time favorites.
But if they end up adapting the second installment into a musical, you really won’t need another opinion article out of me. Every major theme of that one will be on the front page of The New York Times.
P.S. If I ever get super wealthy, you may not know it, but just take a look at my license plate and compare it to the vanity plates on the DeLorean.
To contact this writer, email Muse Newspaper at musebsa@bsfa.org.
Featured photo by NAME for The Muse.
