Back to the Future: The Musical won the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Musical in London before transferring to Broadway in 2023.
This Broadway production has closed, but international productions have opened in other markets — check current tour and overseas listings if you want to see it live.
Bob Gale co-wrote the 1985 film and wrote the stage book, which is the reason the adaptation is so faithful that it occasionally works against itself: the plot mechanics that made the screenplay a model of construction leave little room for songs to change anything. Alan Silvestri, who scored the film, wrote the new music with Glen Ballard, and Silvestri's original orchestral theme is folded in where the story needs it. Four numbers from the film's soundtrack survive into the show, including the Chuck Berry standard the plot depends on.
The production is engineered around one effect. The DeLorean is a practical stage vehicle that has to accelerate, take off and travel through time in front of an audience with sightlines from three directions, and the sequence delivering that is what the marketing was built on and what most reviews led with. John Rando directed.
It had its premiere at the Manchester Opera House in February 2020, weeks before British theatres closed, and reopened at the Adelphi Theatre in London in September 2021, where it won the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The Broadway production opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in August 2023, drew two Tony nominations in 2024 without winning either, and closed on 5 January 2025.
The gap between the London and New York verdicts is the interesting part of its record. The same show that took the West End's principal musical prize met a markedly cooler critical reception in New York, where reviewers tended to weigh the score against the spectacle and find it thin. Neither judgement is obviously wrong; the show is a piece of stage engineering wrapped around a screenplay that was already complete, and how much that bothers a given audience turns out to vary a great deal by city.
1634 Broadway, New York, NY 10019 · Official site ↗
Back to the Future: The Musical is a musical with music and lyrics by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard and a book by Bob Gale. It is adapted from the 1985 film Back to the Future by Robert Zemeckis and Gale. The show features original music, as well as songs featured in the film.
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