Back To The Future: The Musical
Winter Garden Theater - New York, NY
We celebrated our anniversary last night with my first Broadway show which was based on my wife's favorite movie.
Back To The Future: The Musical premiered at Manchester Opera House during the earliest days of the pandemic before moving to London's West End in 2021. It opened last summer on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater and has been getting a lot of favorable reviews, both from frequent theatergoers and newbies such as myself who love the source material.
The musical stage adaptation of Back To The Future stars Casey Likes as Marty McFly and Roger Bart as Doc Brown. Both have an impressive list of credits on the stage, but I'm more familiar with their work in films. Likes starred in the 2023 horror film Dark Harvest, and Bart has an even longer filmography, but I remember him best as the villain Stuart from Hostel: Part II.
The show was incredible! There were quite a few changes from the plot points in the movie, but they all made sense and none of them hurt the overall story from the source material. There are a ton of easter eggs hiding in the sets, including a Clayton Ravine pennant hanging on the wall of Doc Brown's laboratory. I don't want to say too much more because if you love the movie, you really should go into this with as little advanced knowledge as possible. All of the changes and easter eggs were fun surprises that made the show that much more engaging.
Roger Bart plays Doc Brown with a frantic energy that reminded me of Sam Kinison, and it absolutely works! He has a Devo-inspired song at the start of the second half after intermission that was one of my favorite parts of the show. Our show featured Jonalyn Saxer in the role of Lorraine Baines McFly in place of regular cast member Liana Hunt. I can't compare the two women's performance because I only saw the show this one time, but Saxer's performance was absolutely fantastic. Hugh Coles was equally excellent in his role as George McFly, as was Joshua Kenneth Allen Johnson in a dual role as Mayor Goldie Wilson and bandleader Marvin Berry, and Hannah Kevitt as Jennifer Parker.
If you love the Back To The Future movies, you absolutely need to see this show. I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Even if you're not generally a fan of musicals, I'm confident that this will blow away anyone who enjoys the films.
