Back to the Future: The Musical
Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts
Hartford
June 6, 2025
There’s no sugarcoating it. I was very disappointed.
I’d been waiting since January for the premiere of Back to the Future: The Musical to grace the stage at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts. Finally, on a drizzly Friday evening, I sat down to watch the story of Marty and Doc as they galavant around Hill Valley in the 1950s.
Back to the Future: the Musical is a retelling of the classic 1985 film on Broadway. The play relies heavily on projected images onto screens around the stage, which give the impression of movement. These worked, replicating some of the film’s most famous scenes. When the DeLorean flashed onto the stage, all I could do was grin. It looked even cooler in person than it did in the movie.
So after all of that praise, what could possibly be the problem?
Too. Much. Music.
I know how ridiculous that sounds. Yet my concerns began when I learned that the runtime for the play is two hours and 40 minutes. There needs to be a pretty compelling story to hold anyone’s attention for nearly three hours. More than that, the original film only had a runtime of 116 minutes. Accounting for a 15-minute intermission, what could possibly fill another 29 minutes of stage time?
The answer was songs. All of the songs were original, as BttF didn’t have any singing. So yes, it makes sense that a musical would run slightly longer. The issue was that at times, it felt like the singing was stalling exposition instead of jazzing it up.
For example, there’s a catchy song performed when Marty enters the malt shop and bumps into his father for the first time. The star is Goldie Wilson, played with energy and a spectacular singing voice by Carteze Tucker. He’s singing about his future as the mayor of Hill Valley. At one point during the song, both George and Marty sneak out of the shop, and the song continues on without them.
That was a metaphor for the majority of the musical’s songs: They lose their main characters in service of the music. I enjoyed Tucker’s singing voice, but I honestly had no interest in hearing about Goldie Wilson’s motivations, hopes and dreams. In the original film, the reference to Wilson becoming mayor is just a well-done causality joke; here it gets dragged into an entertaining yet uninteresting spectacle.
There are some great musical pieces in the play. The song when Marty wakes up in his mother’s bed is a raunchy bit of hilariousness, and if the play had oriented itself around a few tentpole songs, it could have been a success. But nearly every transition to a new scene has a song. At times, songs play back to back to back without exaggeration. It becomes too much, quickly.
The performers were some of the best I’ve seen on the Bushnell stage. George McFly was performed by Mike Bindeman, who used his physicality to contort himself into any number of impossible positions to demonstrate the nerdy awkwardness of the elder McFly. Young Lorraine McFly, performed by Zan Berube, is a fireball of rebellious energy that gives Lea Thompson’s performance a run for its money. This is an all-star cast. Unfortunately, they too are buried under too many musical interludes.
In the end, the excesses of Back to the Future: The Musical made me long for the lean, mean movie machine that it’s based on. The cast was great and the production was superb. I just wish they hadn’t been smothered in music.
