Minimum Familiarity: Heard of it. It helps if you’re familiar to a mild extent with Back to the Future, either the movies or the musical. I avoid spoiling plot details, but I do talk about my overall impressions of the Broadway musical, so I recommend waiting to read this if you plan to see the musical.
Have you ever seen a show or watched a movie that you really wanted to love? Hopefully this applies to much of the entertainment you consume (watching things you expect to hate is reliably unpleasant), but it certainly applied to me when I saw Back to the Future on Broadway. Having successfully eluded any substantive spoilers, the only knowledge I had of the show was a few pictures of the preshow of the London production that I’d seen on social media. Upon seeing the very cool aesthetic and getting excited about the design possibilities of the show, I avoided as much media as I could and awaited the show’s arrival in New York.
Hopes for the Future
The preshow on Broadway is as cool as promised. Circuit boards laced with LEDs form a proscenium and then splinter over and around the audience, crawling along the box seats and across the ceiling. Beams of light pulse around the room in sleek and exciting hues of deep blue. As you look around this dynamic environment, you hear a distant ticking, and projections on a central screen provide okay photo ops (projecting on black surfaces is always a struggle) and the obligatory warnings about turning your phone off.
Few preshows I can think of so effectively generate anticipation and excitement for what awaits you. The aesthetic statement is so strong that it draws you in, and I was smiling before the show had even started.
Dashed in the Past
The strength of the preshow ends up doubling as a weakness of the production, because the actual design aesthetic of the show itself can’t quite match that of the preshow. And that’s really the phenomenon I want to discuss here. Everything in advance of Back to the Future actually starting had me hyped, possibly to a degree that the actual performance had no chance of meeting.
Tim Hatley’s set design, beyond that initial iconic look, leans fairly literal, and the aesthetic onstage never resembles that of the extensive circuit-board proscenium. Instead we get various incarnations of the town square, along with some creative uses of track/turntable combos to reveal fairly traditional interiors.1
Scenic elements aside, the writing of the show itself is slow to lift off, and some of the direction choices still perplex me. All characters in this show behave more like caricatures than anything resembling reality, so I had a hard time connecting or caring about any of them. And while the music makes great use of the full scale of the original film score (it’s very cool hearing this score played live), the actual songs range widely in quality, and once again feel really traditional despite the edgy and futuristic surroundings.
I should say that I didn’t come here to hate on Back to the Future. I only bring up these criticisms because they’re the reason that, by intermission, I was feeling pretty down. I concluded that my too-high expectations had led me to disappointment. But then I watched Act II.
A Time Loop
Act II doesn’t solve many of the issues I had with the show. But it does deliver a couple of sequences that defy description. Seamless collaboration between set, video, and lighting design lead to a climactic final scene that is everything I had hoped for in a show based on such an epic movie and with such extensive design opportunities. This scene (Marty and Doc’s attempt to return Marty from the 1950s to the 1980s amid a massive thunderstorm) feels cinematic yet distinctly theatrical. It shows off the crazy-cool Delorean set piece and uses a combination of a downstage scrim and upstage LED wall to quickly hide, reveal, and transition between the various practical set pieces involved.
Following this goosebump-inducing sequence is a quick denouement (none of the poor decisions Marty made had any negative consequences!), and we quickly get into the Huey Lewis songs from the original movie. “The Power of Love” feels like it’s going to be the final number, until Doc shows up in a crazy outfit and tells Marty he has one last journey for them to take, this time into…the future (and, I believe, technically to the very date and time at which the performance is taking place). I don’t want to spoil that final sequence, but I will describe it as analogous to the iconic technical moments of the spectacle-oriented musicals of the past. Think Miss Saigon helicopter, Phantom chandelier, that type of thing.
The show comes out of this final time-traveling sequence, goes into “Back in Time” (probably my favorite song in the show), and wraps things up. By the time I left the theater (after staying for the exit music, of course), I was beaming as I reflected on the creativity and excitement I’d just witnessed. The first time I saw it, the only thought I left with was “I have to see that again.”
How the Past Shapes the Future
So did I enjoy Back to the Future? Most of this article suggests I probably didn’t. It failed to meet most of the criteria I look for in a theatrical experience. But it overperformed immensely on one one of those criteria: a strong ending. The ending was so strong it effectively erased the two hours prior that I, for the most part, did not enjoy. I don’t know if this says something about me, something about recency bias, or if there’s a more general phenomenon at work here.
Do you like things you know are flawed? I think we all do. And though I described my theater-going as if I have some rubric that lists everything I look for, that’s far from the truth. The “rubric” really works retroactively, as an attempt to explain why I felt a certain way about something I experienced. Experience with a creative work doesn’t depend on an objective evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses; all that really matters is how it makes you feel.
And this show made me feel good! Several moments in it surprised and excited me, though it also left me wondering what heights it could have achieved if a greater portion of it had made me feel that way.
I try not to feel ashamed of the things I like. Everyone has different tastes, and with art there is no obligation to partake. If someone doesn’t like or is not interested in something, they don’t have to consume it. So it’s okay if you don’t like Back to the Future. But that won’t stop me from seeing it again to relive the moments I can’t get out of my head.
- While the set design often underwhelmed me, I must note that the first appearance of the time-traveling Delorean is absolutely epic, and it’s the clear highlight of the first act for me.
↩︎
Leave a Reply