‘Back to the Future' celebrates 40 years, and a musical reworking

Boston Globe

01-07-2025

Luke Antony Neville, left, and Lucas Hallauer, right, in "Back to the Future."
McLeod9 Creative
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However, as they met with potential producers, they faced skepticism. 'We thought, 'This is going to be easy! Everybody and their uncle ought to be lining up to do this,'' Gale says.
'But it wasn't like that. They'd always say, 'Well, you guys have never done musical theater before. What makes you think you can do it?' And we'd say, 'Well, we invented the franchise! We know a whole lot about these characters and the story.''
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After a long-and-winding development path, 'Back to the Future: The Musical' finally bowed in Manchester, England, in 2020 before opening in London the following year, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Musical. Broadway beckoned in 2023, and now its national tour speeds into the Citizens Opera House, July 8-20, presented by Broadway in Boston, on the heels of the film's 40th anniversary on July 3.
But as with the paradox that Marty unleashes by time-traveling back to 1955 and nearly screwing up his parents' courtship, the musical headed to Boston would've been erased from existence if not for a few 'sliding doors' moments.
It all started with a storm that flooded screenwriter Bob Gale's childhood home in St. Louis. While helping his parents clean out the basement, he found his father's high school yearbook and saw his picture as senior class president. 'I thought about the president of my class, who was one of these rah-rah school spirit guys who I would've had nothing to do with,' Gale recalls. 'And I wondered, 'Was my dad that kind of guy? Would I have been friends with my dad if I'd gone to high school with him?''
As he stared at the photo, a lightning-bolt thought struck him: What if I could go back and meet my father back then? That sparked the idea for a film about a teenager who gets accidentally whisked back in time, encounters his parents as high schoolers, and tries to ensure they fall in love with each other so he doesn't get deleted from history.
As Gale and Zemeckis began developing the musical,
they enlisted the film's composer Alan Silvestri and Grammy-winning songwriter Glen Ballard to write the score, with influences from both 1980s and 1950s rock. But the road was strewn with potholes. By 2014, they'd parted ways with visionary theater auteur Jamie Lloyd, who just won a Tony Award for his reimagining of 'Sunset Boulevard' ('He had some wacky ideas,' Gale says),
and hired Tony-winning '
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It was important to them to strike a balance between honoring the original film while creating something new for a different genre. 'One of the things that we were very resolute about was that we did not want this stage production to be a carbon copy of the movie,' Gale says.
Many of the movie's famous lines and classic moments remain, but other aspects were altered or excised. So you'll see the DeLorean fly and Doc declare, 'Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.' Lorraine (
With a musical, though, you can crack open the characters' hearts and inner-lives in song.
Silvestri and Ballard wrote a heartfelt second act number for Doc Brown (David Josefsberg), 'For the Dreamers,' where he sings about creative visionaries, both the famous and the failed, who have big ideas and 'never stop believing in them.' 'Musical theater gave us a way to really go deep into Doc Brown's head,' Gale says. 'And because Doc Brown sings, he automatically becomes a warmer character.'
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They wrote a 1950s-style doo-wop number, 'Pretty Baby,' for Marty's mother Lorraine to sing in the 1955 timeline to the handsome young stranger asleep in her bed, as Marty nervously fends off her advances. 'Musical theater can take the reality of a situation and put it into a heightened, kind of twisted place,' Rando said.
For Marty's meek father, George (Mike Bindeman), who's bossed around by his high school bully, Biff (Nathaniel Hackmann), where 'we learn about him and how he wants the girl, but he's afraid to go after her,' Gale says. Then in 'Put Your Mind To It,' Marty tries to boost George's self-confidence so he can win Lorraine's heart by 'teaching him to dance and to stand up for himself and fight for what he wants.'
Ultimately, the father-son dynamic is key. 'The boy learns about his parents in a way that he had never dreamed of and finds himself closer to his family at the end,' Rando says.
Naturally, the car is the 1.21 gigawatt star. So the team needed to create the illusion that the flux-capacitor-powered DeLorean speeds across the stage at 88 miles per hour, travels through time and later achieves liftoff. That meant leaning into the innovative magic of Tim Hatley's scenic design, Finn Ross' video design, and Chris Fisher's theatrical illusions. 'It's really spectacular,' Gale says.
'I think we raised the bar on what you could do on stage.'
Of course, they worried about disappointing fans with a stage version that didn't live up to the film. But Gale says that most fans he's encountered have adored the show, including one woman in London who told him she quit therapy and instead spent that money on tickets to see 'Back to the Future' every week—and she's happier for it.
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Gale speculates that the story continues to resonate 40 years later because it captures the moment in every child's life when 'they suddenly understand that my parents were once young like me. That's a cosmic idea.'
It also powerfully illustrates
how one decision in life can have far-reaching effects.
'We see these two different timelines for the McFly family—one where George stands up for himself, and one is where George wimps out. So it's a good reminder to people to say, 'The things that I do in my life matter. This may be an important decision I'm making, and I need to give it thought.'
BACK TO THE FUTURE
Presented by Broadway in Boston. At: Citizens Opera House, July 8-20. Tickets: from $40;