Back To The Future Is Getting Rebooted And Not In The Way You’d Expect
Back to the Future: The Musical is coming from London's West End to Broadway later this summer, the award-winning musical's first time stateside.
Back to the Future is headed back to the stage. Following its run on the West End in London, Back to the Future: The Musical will open on Broadway this summer. Per The Hollywood Reporter, the production has cast its lead role, with Broadway alum Casey Likes taking on Michael J. Fox’s most famous 80s character, Marty McFly.
Casey Likes made his Broadway debut in the musical adaptation of Almost Famous. Off stage, Likes has made his way on camera, appearing as Kiss’s Gene Simmons in this spring’s music biopic Spinning Gold and the upcoming horror film Dark Harvest. Likes will appear in Back to the Future alongside West End production holdovers Roger Bart, who plays Doc Brown, and Hugh Coles as George McFly.
The stage production follows the plot of the original Back to the Future, the 1985 film that first sent Marty McFly flying through time in a DeLorean. McFly travels from 1985 to 1955, where he accidentally thwarts the moment his parents fall in love. He then has to coach his spineless teenage father into a meet-cute with his mother before he disappears from time forever.
Along the way, Marty McFly must avert nightmare-inducing advances from his smitten teenage mother, defeat the school bully, and reunite with the era’s Doc Brown to devise a way to return home, all while keeping his identity a secret.
Back to the Future: The Musical is put together from a book by the film’s co-writer, Bob Gale, and music and lyrics from the original film’s composer, Alan Silvestri, assisted by songwriter and producer Glen Ballard. The show received mostly positive reviews from critics and audiences during its time on the West End and won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Musical.
The crowd-pleaser has been called a wonderful tribute to its source material. Released nearly 40 years ago, Back to the Future has endured as one of the defining films of its time. Produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Robert Zemeckis, Back to the Future caught lightning in a bottle, fusing goofy, 80s fun with a tight, witty script.
A $381 million box office total made Back to the Future the highest-grossing film of 1985. It became the People’s Choices Awards’ Favorite Motion Picture and earned Gale and Zemeckis Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay. The movie also delivered an enduring radio hit, Huey Lewis and the News’s “Power of Love.”
The success of Back to the Future sparked a trilogy, and murmurs of another sequel or spin-off have echoed through time ever since. As studios mine franchises from the past for new stories, news of a Back to the Future animated Netflix marks the latest development in the effort to bring this gem from the past into the modern era.
Few films have managed to capture such a wide audience with the longevity of Back to the Future. The Broadway musical looks to perpetuate that legacy even further, proving that Back to the Future is truly timeless.
