Review: BACK TO THE FUTURE: THE MUSICAL at CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre

Great Scott! Set your DeLorean time circuit to Summer 2025 as the cinematic blockbuster Back to the Future crash lands in Toronto at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre. Winner of the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Musical, Back to the Future: The Musical is adapted to the stage by the movie's creators Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis and directed by Tony Award Winner John Rando. 

This new musical retells the story of Marty McFly (played by Lucas Hallauer), the quirky high school kid who has a love of music and a less than forunate label of slacker by the principal, and his friendship with Doc Brown (David Josefsberg) the wildly eccentric mad scientist who has a new invention he's elated to show off - a time machine made out of a DeLorean car. Through a series of chaotic events, Marty finds himself transported back to 1955, back to when his parents were awkward teenagers, in particular his dad George (Mike Bindeman). In order to get back to his present year of 1985, Marty has to find a much younger Doc Brown who warns him not to interfere with the past as it can have drastic affects on the future...  

If you grew up with the classic film featuring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, then the musical stage show is right up your alley. If the movie was simply beyond your time, fret not - the stage production stays fairly true to the source material with only minor deviances.

Admittedly, the performance as a whole comes off as glitzy yet frothy. The show is delivered in a flashy song and dance spectacle complete with back up dancers that seem to come out of nowhere. At one moment the fourth wall is cracked when Marty asks Doc Brown where his back up dancers come from and he simply responds with "they follow me around!" but that doesn't quite explain why they appear when Doc isn't around. It can also be said that the characters come off as caricatures of themselves, almost a pantomime but not quite - George hits the obtuse side of being socially awkward but not far enough that it's campy. Though Linda MyFly (Lizzy Marie Legregin) hits all the correct cringe notes when she's flirting with Marty, which is clearly the point.  

The pivitol scene where Marty and Linda are in the car waiting for George to find them could have been better delivered with the use of an actual car set piece. The actors are sat on car seats, that could just as well be a park bench, with the reflection of the back window on the set behind. As Marty is discovered by the bully Biff Tannen (Nathaniel Hackmann) in the car, it appears that Biff grabs him off a bench rather than through a car which changes the tension of the scene in a way that is hard to ignore.

As far as Back to the Future: The Musical is concerned, it is a great piece of fun nostalgia for those who dreamed about flying through space and time in their own DeLorean time machine. For me, the froth and spectacle weren't able to keep me grounded and I was left wanting more.