Bart is mostly on the sidelines that day in the rehearsal room, with the young cast taking on the hardcore choreography for “There’s Something About That Boy.” But Doc Brown is still right there with him. When someone notices that Likes is wearing neon-colored socks with the Back to the Future logo on them, Bart chimes in with a perfectly timed “Great Socks!”
When the cast arrives at the Winter Garden Theatre the next day, it’s a whirlwind of activity, with trucks loading in props, an elaborate series of lights wrapping around the balconies to mimic the DeLorean’s exterior, and a pyrotechnics test to familiarize the actors with the show’s many dazzling effects. Two weeks later, they’ll be performing for live audiences, an experience that Likes is still figuring out how to describe. “I’m really blown away,” he says. “Every single night is a party, and it’s always cheering, it’s always just pandemonium in the crowd. It feels really, really great to be a part of something so, so, so much bigger than myself.”
From Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.
Like Bart, Gale was on hand for the performances in Manchester and London, and has noticed a distinct difference between British and American audiences. “The rule of thumb is that it takes a lot to get a standing ovation in London, and you just have to show up to get a standing ovation on Broadway,” Gale says. Before the show begins, he sometimes mills around in the lobby, knowing he might get recognized by a handful of superfans. “Every night, I go in to get a dose of adrenaline,” Gale says. For Bart, after moving the show across the ocean, “it’s a wonderful relief to play it in America and know that they feel the same way.”
Back to the Future: The Musical is undeniably a nostalgia trip, and a double-sided one too, with music from the ’50s as well as the ’80s worked into the songs by composers Glen Ballard and Alan Silvestri. But nobody who has been watching Back to the Future for decades is going to pay Broadway prices to see exactly what they already know. To Gale, his job was to elegantly solve problems, removing scenes that wouldn’t work well onstage—the skateboard chase, of course, but also the arrival of the Libyans with their guns, and Einstein the dog— and finding ways to “solve a problem elegantly.” (The danger of the Libyans is replaced by plutonium poisoning; Einstein is entirely absent, with Bart joking that “he couldn’t get out of his Annie contract.”)
But it’s not just that a musical has to be different, but bigger, with large-scale emotions in the songs, backup dancers at every opportunity, and the sense that this very familiar story has leapt beyond the bounds of the VHS tapes where so many people first encountered it. The mission, as Gale sums it up, was, “we’ve gotta enhance it, but we can’t mess it up.” Bart calls it “comfort food, reimagined.”
From Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.