When most of the reviews for your show says “you might want to just watch the movie instead,” you know you’re in trouble. Reliant on the DeLorean for the wow, dripping with basic nostalgia, and devoid of good original music or original writing; by all accounts the over-the-top, underwhelming musical version of Back to the Future has missed its mark.
New York Times Review of Back to the Future
[M]echanical, busy, distracting, foggy. Though large, it’s less a full-scale new work than a semi-operable souvenir. … Still, you might hope that something in the musical, for instance music, would change the way the material lands. It doesn’t. The numbers carried over from the movie…nor most of the 17 new songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, though tuneful and in a few cases rousing, do anything different from what the movie did anyway. … Why, other than the opportunity to rake in a gazillion more dollars, make a musical out of a movie that clearly does not want you to? I say that because, like most pop science fiction, “Back to the Future” resists (and barely benefits from) deepening. Its plot is necessarily complex and its characters compensatorily flat — instead of, preferably for a musical, the other way around. … Still, in this first post-“Phantom of the Opera” season, I have to admit that the car alone might be worth a ticket. It fills a deep Broadway longing for large objects performing audience flyovers — and, like the dear departed arthritic chandelier, may be doing so for the foreseeable future.
Deadline Review of Back to the Future
[T]he BTFM musical stage adaptation opening tonight on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre is so bombastically intent on justifying its existence that it bullies away whatever warm nostalgia we might have for the movie. With a cast directed (by John Rando) to exaggerate every joke, gesture and facial expression – only the always reliable Roger Bart, who plays the eccentric genius inventor Doc Brown, has the chops and instincts to nail the over-the-topness. … Part of the blame for the mostly lackluster experience falls to the music and lyrics by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, a generic-sounding pastiche of ’80s and ’50s rock styles that fails to capture the excitement or freshness of either era. The music is essentially the aural equivalent of Tim Hatley’s theme-party costume designs and Chris Bailey’s predictable choreography. … No matter, really. With a show like Back To The Future: The Musical, comparisons are, like resistance, futile. And your kids are gonna love it.
TimeOut Review of Back to the Future
Attending Back to the Future: The Musical is a bit like watching a car crash in slow motion, except for the part about not being able to look away. … The ever-present underscoring—drawn from Silvestri’s music for the 1985 movie—is fine, but Back to the Future sputters to a halt whenever an actual song begins; the musical numbers are a series of missed opportunities to deepen characters or situations. … What makes Back to the Future so confusing, aside from the general ineptness, is how little it seems to understand its own relationship to the material it is trying to exploit. The show spends half of its time slavishly reproducing lines and details from Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 film—Likes has even been directed to imitate the catch in Michael J. Fox’s voice—and the other half treating its own story like piffle, with corny added jokes and broad metatheatrical references and gags; in a ludicrous outer-space number for Doc Brown that opens the second act, it abandons all trappings of sense altogether. A similar fate befalls too many shows that try to cash in on cinematic IP, and the Broadway musical, as an art form, can’t keep getting lost on these roads. If this is the future, please send it back.
New York Post Review of Back to the Future
“Back To The Future: The Musical,” which opened Thursday night on Broadway, doesn’t have much going for it in the way of tuneful songs, show-stopping dances or enthralling storytelling. But it does have a star vehicle. … Onstage, the famous DeLorean drives, spins, flies and turns upside down with the actors inside it. The hotrod is the biggest special effect the Winter Garden Theatre has seen since “Rocky the Musical” plopped a boxing ring in the middle of the orchestra nearly 10 years ago. But Huey Lewis did not sing “Power of Car,” he sang “Power of Love.” And heart is completely absent from director John Rando’s shiny and serviceable staging of the beloved 1985 science-fiction movie. … [The show] never justifies its perplexing existence as a stage musical. “Reenact the movie, sure,” the audience sits there thinking. “But please stop singing.” … Hyperactive Bart does to Doc exactly what he did to Fredrick in “Young Frankenstein”: talks ultra-fast, grimaces and shouts. His Brown is a clown who is impossible to care one iota about, let alone 1.2 gigawatts. … …[Casey Like]’s undoubtedly a big talent and he brings the same gee-whiz energy here that’s so easy for an audience to root for. How unfortunate that he’s been done such a disservice by this forgettable music. … It made me want to go back… to the movie!
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