Sydney Lyric
It's all zippy, loud and stylish - and the DeLorean is a thrill. But this show is almost too loyal to the 1985 comedy.
If you've never seen Back to the Future - the 1985 sci-fi comedy by Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis, with its time-travelling DeLorean, mad scientist and plot to stop yourself from never being born - you should probably skip this musical. It's fun and easy to follow, but casual visitors may feel they're missing something.
This is because we're never taken below the surface. The film has real heart underneath all the irreverent misadventures of teenager Marty McFly (Michael J Fox originally, Axel Duffy here) and Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd, now Roger Bart). Moments after Doc first achieves time travel, Marty is flung back to 1955. He crashes his parents' meet-cute and risks being erased. (His mother falls for Marty instead - don't think too hard about it.)
Back in the 80s, he has left behind his band, his girl and Doc in danger. There's a sneaky sweetness to the film's urgency: how can Marty, just an aspiring rock god in a family of lovable losers, save everyone and everything he knows?
The musical follows the plot lovingly and loyally. There are a couple of enjoyable updates: Doc is no longer in mortal danger from a questionably stereotyped band of Libyan terrorists; instead it's radiation poisoning. The time-travel information is inputted via voice activation to get around closeups on the dashboard. An ensemble of singers and dancers appear whenever Doc, charmingly aware of that fourth wall, starts to sing.
But that's all superficial. Gale, a ferocious protector of the franchise, wrote the book, and he doesn't leave much room for innovation. Duffy's Marty is a deeply committed and well-sung Fox imitation that verges on caricature; Ethan Jones does a bang-on screen-to-stage Crispin Glover impersonation as Marty's oddball father. They're both talented and funny - as are the rest of the cast - but they're also hemmed in by decades-old choices and cadences.
In scene after scene, Gale jettisons narrative surprise and character depth to instead focus on spectacle, privileging that nostalgic joy of recognition over the slower burn of revelation. One of the pleasures in the film is discovering what the figures in Marty's life and town were up to in the 50s after getting a glimpse of them in the 80s - such as Mayor Goldie Wilson (Javon King here, with the ease of an old-school showman). Onstage in the musical, however, we're straight-up told about his past in the opening number.
Speaking of numbers: apart from when Alan Silvestri's heroic original score swells, the musical is a bore. Silvestri and Glen Ballard (who co-wrote Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill but also the painfully average Ghost musical) lean on 80s pop-rock in the present and 50s sounds in the past, though the show breaks its own rules. That might seem like a small gripe, but that musical inconsistency buries into the subconscious. When a musical's emotional language is muddled, the feelings get lost in translation: it makes the songs feel a little bit detached from their surroundings. The most egregious example of this slippage is in a mawkish second-act ode to having dreams (the lyrics are no more specific or varied than this) sung by Doc.
Does any of this matter to its target demographic? Probably not. Doc is still the best part of the musical and Bart, who originated the role on Broadway and took it to the West End, has a livewire spirit that taps into and maintains the energy of the film with a comedian's precision and a clown's embrace of the absurd.
The next biggest star is, of course, the DeLorean. It disappears and reappears on stage in an instant thanks to illusion designer Chris Fisher. It's a thrilling set-piece: it lights up and spins and moves. There's a liberal use of screens to suggest the car's great speed and help hurtle us through time, which adds a cinematic scale to the whole affair; the woman seated in front of me on opening night almost leapt out of her seat during the musical's final race through time.
It all goes down easily. The songs aren't interesting, but they're not tough to endure. It's all zippy, loud and stylish. The soundtrack's most memorable songs - The Power of Love and Johnny B Goode - are included to perk things up. The show is light, funny and stacked with film-reference Easter eggs. And that's what this show is all about: it's a dopamine hit for the lifelong fans, a commercial love letter that dodges risk to give you the smoothest possible ride back to your past.