THE HANGOVER REPORT – BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE MUSICAL leans in on campy parody and theme park spectacle, forcefully inducing nostalgia

A scene from “Back to the Future: The Musical” at the Winter Garden Theatre (photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)

This week, I had the chance to catch up with Back to the Future: The Musical which savvily opened at the Winter Garden Theatre earlier this month in time to lure summer tourists into its clutches. The production arrives on Broadway after having proved a success across the pond in London’s West End, where it garnered the Olivier Award for Best New Musical. Based on Robert Zemeckis’s hit 1985 time-traveling movie of the same name starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, the musical tells the story of a teenager who travels back to 1955 only to get mixed up in his parents’ high school courtship.

There’s no doubt about it — Back to the Future: The Musical lives and breathes by aggressively catering to the audience’s fond nostalgia for the underlying film, and, to a lesser extent, American culture of the 1980s and the 1950s. As someone who grew up watching the film countless times as a kid, I found myself chuckling over the exaggerated scene recreations from the movie. Indeed, Bob Gale’s book sticks extremely closely to the original script, and that’s by careful design. Unsurprisingly, the musical’s weakest moments are when it breaks into song — Glen Ballard and Alan Silvestri’s benign, relentlessly generic score harmlessly augments Huey Lewis and the News’s “The Power of Love” and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” — starkly calling into question the need to musicalize the material in the first place.

Much of John Rando’s cartoonish, fast-paced production veers awfully close in tone to campy parody, which at times seems at odds with genuine earnestness of the film. However, by the crowd-pleasing second act, I found myself succumbing to the forceful tongue-in-cheek charms of Rando’s staging — particularly as giddily embodied by Roger Bart as Doc Brown — as well as its thorough (if uneasy) embrace of jaw-dropping theme park spectacle. In the central role of Marty McFly, young Casey Likes is adorably game, uncannily channeling Michael J. Fox’s iconic portrayal. 

SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED

BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE MUSICAL
Broadway, Musical
Winter Garden Theatre
2 hours, 30 minutes (including one intermission)
Open run

Categories: Broadway, Theater

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