BACK TO THE FUTURE
Back To The Future: The Musical hits the West End at 88mph
Not quite the Mcfly jukebox musical you were expecting…
“BACK TO THE FUTURE HAS NEVER BEEN out of my consciousness,” says Bob Gale, co-writer of 1985’s paradox-packed classic. “This movie, these characters, they’re like my children. You never lose sight of your kids, right?”
Now his Hill Valley offspring have time-warped to 2021 and the West End stage. Back To The Future: The Musical reimagines the adventures of Marty Mcfly as a song-anddance spectacular, complete with show-stopping special effects and music co-written by Alan Silvestri, who scored Bob Zemeckis’s original movie trilogy.
“Bob’s wife Leslie actually suggested it back in 2005,” says Gale, who’s adapted his own screenplay for the stage. “And then Bob and I started seriously exploring it in 2006. The producer is Colin Ingram, who produced Ghost: The Musical. He’s a big Back To The Future fan. When we told him we were thinking about turning it into a musical, he basically started salivating!”
SEEING DOUBLE
Gale and Zemeckis have always been fiercely protective of the BTTF brand, insisting there can never be big-screen sequels, spin-offs or reboots. So why are they cool with a theatrical take?
“It allows us to revisit the first movie,” Gale tells Red Alert. “It’s the story of the first movie but in a different medium, so that nobody would feel like we were bastardising it or taking advantage, turning it into a money grab, doing an unnecessary sequel. Because it was a musical it allowed us to take a look at the story from a different point of view and in a different medium.
“We always knew that if we weren’t happy with the way it was going, we wouldn’t do it. I’m happy to say that both Bob and I have done very well from Back To The Future. If there was no Back To The Future musical it wouldn’t affect our lives. It’s not like we need to put food on our table. This is a labour of love, to say yeah, let’s see if we can do this, let’s see if we can make it wonderful, let’s see if we can find some new things in Back To The Future that people are really going to enjoy.
“It was very important for us to really understand and appreciate live theatre, and not just retell the movie on the live stage.”
Roger Bart and Olly Dobson take on the roles of Doc Brown and Marty Mcfly. So how does the show navigate the long shadow of those original performances by Christopher Lloyd and Michael J Fox?
“It is a tightrope,” admits Gale, “because people have this vision of these characters, and you don’t want to go too far off of that. But at the same time you always want an actor to make a role for themselves. Obviously there’s a difference in the fact that they’re going to sing these songs – that was a big help, to delineate them and separate them a bit from the movie characters.
“When we had our second workshop we actually brought in about a dozen really serious Back To The Future fans. We thought to ourselves, ‘You know what, we better let some fans see this in this early iteration, because if they hate it then we need to go back to square one.’
“But they didn’t hate it, they loved it and in fact in the intermission of this workshop two women came up to me and introduced themselves as the founders of the Michael J Fox fan club. They said, ‘We came in here and we were real sceptical that anybody else could be Marty Mcfly, but about 10 minutes in we were totally with Olly Dobson and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.’”
A double-whammy of ’50s and ’80s nostalgia, the musical version delivers one of the movie’s most iconic symbols. “We knew that if we didn’t have a Delorean it wasn’t going to be Back To The Future. There were things that we knew we couldn’t do. There were also things where we said ‘We have to do this.’ We have to have a Delorean, we have to have the clock tower, we have to have lightning… I didn’t know how we were going to make the Delorean look like it was going 88 miles per hour. It was one of those things where you say, ‘Okay, this is a leap of faith. We’re going to tell the production people: figure this out!’
“When you see it you’re going to be blown away. I was certainly blown away that they managed to do this stuff!”
So can Gale ever see Back To The Future Part II and III making it to the stage?
“At this point, I would say no. But I also know, as the barbed wire salesman said in Back To The Future Part III, you never know what the future may bring!” NS
Back To The Future is on at the Adelphi Theatre, London – visit backtothefuturethemusical.com.
IN SEE, APPLE TV+’S ambitious postapocalyptic drama, Jason Momoa plays Baba Voss, a tribe leader in a future where the majority of surviving humanity no longer have sight due to a devastating virus. Having adapted to exist over hundreds of years, it is the rare “sighted” people – like Voss’s two adopted children Kofun (Archie Madekwe) and Haniwa (Nesta Cooper) – who are feared as “the other”. As such, in the first season finale, Haniwa is taken from her family in a distant city and remanded to Voss’s estranged brother, General Edo Voss.
For the second season, the world of See is going to reflect a lot of changes for Baba Voss and his brethren. In his quest to retrieve his daughter, Voss will descend the mountain and reveal the world outside their reality.
That change also applies to behind the scenes, as executive producer/showrunner Jonathan Tropper assumes the reins of the series from creator Steven Knight. A co-writer of the first season finale, Tropper tells Red Alert that he agreed to formally join the show because of Momoa.
“It was Jason’s passion for this, and his understanding of it, that is actually what ultimately sold me on the show. He was so invested in this, that it was more just me getting sucked into his world,” Tropper laughs. “Jason had a lot of backstory ideas and story ideas.
A large portion of how we start season two, with the concept of the Turantian Empire, and the concept of Dave Bautista’s character [Edo], that all came from stuff Jason had been developing on his own.”
After immersing himself in the mythology of the first season, Tropper says expanding the scope of the world was key. “My goal coming into season two was to take everything they had done in season one, and now extrapolate it out to a larger world.”
IN THE CITY
“Season one really explored the tribal elements of the sightless communities: the threat, the bigotry, the community,” he details. “And it was incredibly focused on Baba Voss and his family. And in that way, we stayed up in the mountains with the Alkenny tribe and with these tribal warriors. For me, season two was about what’s happening down in the city.”
Tropper was excited about everything having Momoa’s character leave his secure enclave and seek out Haniwa and Edo Voss would entail for both Baba and the audience on the route to Trevantis, which is based on the ruins of Pittsburgh. “I wanted to see the places that were a little less reclaimed. Where are the places we might recognise as what used to be the cities we would recognise? I wanted to create
larger populations, more intrigue in the palace, and the idea of the geopolitics in this new, smaller world.”
Baba’s journey also helped the show further confront the ableist mentalities that most people have in regards to those perceived to have disabilities. Tropper notes that the non-blind always assume it would be terrifying to embark on a trip like this without sight. “But after 500 years of blind society, that’s not remotely frightening to these characters. That’s the only reality they know. They simply perceive the world very differently than we do. Baba Voss is an unsighted warrior, and we make it really clear that while having sight definitely gives some of our characters different advantages, it doesn’t make them a better warrior. It was that mindset for everything we built and every scene we wrote this season.”
When Baba does arrive in Edo’s territory, Tropper says the story is both visceral and personal, with Dave Bautista adding a brand new energy to the show. “I really couldn’t think of anyone else who could convincingly play both [Jason’s] brother and be a significant threat to him,” he chuckles. Momoa was enthusiastic, so Tropper wooed Bautista to a New York lunch where he laid out the depth and breadth of the role. “He really became invested in the notion of this long-standing battle between brothers. And I think it was exciting for him to think about going head to head with Jason.”
Tropper says the conflict unspooled in ways better than they could have anticipated. “The great thing about the combination of Jason and Dave is that they’re both these two behemoths, and these action stars, but they have a very different energy. They play things very differently. Each time we put them in the same scene together, there was a real electricity to how they interacted. It was really great watching the scenes with them together. And that’s not even speaking to the geek in me who was excited to see the Marvel and DC Universe colliding,” he laughs. TB
See season two is streaming on Apple TV+ now.
In this season I wanted to see the places that were a little less reclaimed