Announcer: Listener supported, WNYC Studios.

Brigid: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin filling in for Alison Stewart. In this next segment where we're going, we don't need roads.

“MUSIC - Back to the Future theme”

That is, of course, the theme to Back to the Future the classic 1985 time travel movie about a teenager who drives the DeLorean, 30 years into the past, and has to make his parents fall in love before he disappears. Tomorrow night, the story officially opens as a Broadway musical a year after its London production won the 2022 Olivier Award for Best New Musical. The stage adaptation boasts a book by the original movies co-creator and my next guest, Bob Gale, with the director Robert Zemeckis, serving as a producer.

Also, returning from the original film is composer album Alan Silvestri, who worked on the shows music and lyrics with songwriter Glen Ballard. Joining me as well is the musical director, John Rando, known for his work on many musicals, including Urinetown and On the Town. Alan, Bob and John, welcome to All Of It.

Bob: Thank you very much.

John: Thanks

Alan: Nice to be here

Brigid: Listeners, we want to hear from you when was the first time you saw Back to the Future? Do you have questions about the film, or the musical for the creator, Bob Gale, and composer Alan Silvestri, the musical director, John Rando? Call 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-WNYC. Bob, Back to the Future came out in 1985, almost 40 years ago. How many times did the idea of a stage adaptation come up before you were ready to agree to the idea?

Bob: Zero times. Actually, the first time it came up was a result of Bob Zemeckis and his wife, Leslie, seeing the producers here on Broadway. This was in late 2005. They're walking out a theater and Leslie says to Bob, "Hey, did you guys ever think about adapting Back to the Future as a theatrical musical?" Bob said, "That's an interesting idea. Let me kick it around with Bob Gale." Bob came back to California and we got on the phone. We had lunch together. We started kicking around thinking, "Yes, this could be fun. This could be interesting. This is something outside of our wheelhouse to expand our creativity."

Brigid: Sure.

Bob: We got a hold of Alan, and Glen Ballard, who worked together on the songs for Polar Express. In February 2006, we had a meeting in Bob's office, and we started kicking this around. Alan and Glen were totally pumped up about the idea. We all thought, "Yes, maybe this could work. This might really be able to work." We told Glen and Alan, "Why don't you guys go off and write some songs and let's see what happens."

Brigid: Oh, that's so exciting. Alan, as a composer, what thoughts did you have about the idea of turning this story into a musical?

Alan: It was a daunting thought to have Back to the Future on stage. Where Glen and I began was we started to take stock or take inventory. What do we already have? We knew we had the score to the original film. We knew we had these amazing Huey Lewis songs Power of Love and Back in Time. We had Earth Angel. We had Johnny B Goode. It was like, putting silverware out on the table. We put a little cloth down and we laid all this stuff out. Of course, it was, in the end, useful, but not much of a security blanket because there was a lot to do.

We started to work with Bob. Back then, John hadn't appeared yet. We worked our way through this iconic story and it just appeared little by little over a very long time, I would say.

Brigid: Before we dig into the music and the songbook. Bob, you and Robert Zemeckis met but while you were both students at USC. You made three films together before Back to the Future. When did the seeds of the idea for a movie like Back to the Future first start to appear?

Bob: It actually happened in August of 1980. I was back visiting my parents in St. Louis, Missouri. I found my father's high school yearbook in the basement totally by accident, and I'd never seen it before. I'd gone to the same high school that my dad did. I'm looking through to say, "Okay, this will be cool. Let me see what my high school looked like in 1940." There was picture of my father, president of his graduating class, and I had no idea that my dad was one of those guys.

I thought to myself, "Gee, if I had gone to high school with my dad, would I have been friends with him?" Suddenly, the proverbial lightning bolt hit me in the head and I said, "Whoa, that is a great idea for a time travel story."

Brigid: I like your use of the lightning bolts. Very appropriate given the subject matter. John, the show premiered in Manchester, England, and then moved to the West End, in London in 2021. How did the show land in the UK before the US?

John: Colin Ingram, who's the producer is Scottish and he convinced both Bob, Alan, and Glen, and Bob see that he was the right producer for the job. Then it took him a while to find me, eventually found me in 2017, I guess, was our first conversation. At that time, he said to me, "Listen, I really want to do this, but I want to do one thing. I want to produce it in England." I immediately said, "I thought that was a brilliant idea." It was a great place for us to develop it.

What I didn't realize was the enormous popularity of the movie in England and in the UK, and frankly, worldwide, and that it was still very present. It's a holiday movie there. The audience's lap it up because they love this picture. England became a really great proving ground for us. Once we started really in earnest working on the show, we were able to go to London, and assemble a cast there, and start developing the show through doing readings and workshops, and what have you to create what's now finally on stage, both in London and here.

Brigid: Fans of the film and soon-to-be the musical are calling in. I want to go to Wayne in Queens. Wayne, welcome to All Of It. Turn off your radio.

Wayne: Thank you for having me. Can you hear me?

Brigid: We can hear you.

Wayne: Hello. I'd like to say like I said, I was a 16, 17-year-old in high school when that movie came out in '85. I have a 33-year-old son and a 19-year-old son, and we all love the movie. In fact, my 33-year-old son when he was 7 and he saw all three movies when he found out that there was no more Back to The Future after part 3, he literally cried. I said, "Don't worry." It broke all of our hearts when they took off the ride from Universal Studios. Oh, my gosh.

Bob: Ours too.

Alan: Ours too.

Wayne: It broke our heart. I'm glad they still have the theme songs. When we go to Universal Studios, you still hear the music. Nothing, I'm telling you. That movie, it transformed me, I'm telling you. The kids love it. We're looking forward to seeing the Broadway show and hopefully, it capture some of that magic.

Bob: We've captured it. Trust me, we have captured it. This is why I have been with this thing from the very beginning. We don't want to ruin anybody's childhood. I don't believe we have. We get so many people saying, "Oh, I thought it was going to be good, but I didn't think it was going to be this good."

Brigid: Let's get into some of the music in this new show. Alan, I want to play a bit of an early song from the musical called It's Only a Matter of Time which incorporates the theme from the original Back to the Future films. Let's hear a little bit.

[MUSIC- Cedric Neal and Olly Dobson: It's Only a Matter of Time]

I'm looking around

There's nothing here can slow me down

It's feeling like my lucky day

Gonna make it and then skate away

I'll be on the radio

They'll know me everywhere I go

It won't be long, they're going to see

I'll be on MTV

I'll rock my future

A winner, not a loser Nothing anyone can say can make it any other way

I've got my future

A player not a cruiser

I'll be just what I want to be

Rocking all the way through history

It’s feeling like a new day

Brigid: Alan, how did you and Glen and Bob and the other producers talk about what elements from the original film score were important to retain? What can you tell us about that song?

Alan: It was the very first thing we looked at and it was wonderful because the Bobs, I'll refer to Mr. Zemeckis and Mr. Gale every now and again, it's the Bobs. The Bobs were so generous in the amount of freedom they gave us initially. They literally said, "You guys go off and work, and bring something back to us." It was, in a sense, an obvious thing for Glenn and I to think of the idea of adapting some fragment or some piece of the score lyrically in the musical. The other thing we knew, first off was, you have to have an opening number.

Only a matter of time, the whole show is woven with time. It was an obvious place for us to begin. It's much like everything that happened musically, we just kept finding our way, we need something here, we need something like this, we need to do this. We just kept weaving.

Brigid: John, the performances of almost all the actors in the show are really clear nods to the respective characters in the film. Casey Likes has the Michael J Fox kind of crack in his voice as Marty and Roger Bart has the Christopher Lloyd mania of Doc Brown, and maybe most of all actor Hugh Coles, who plays Marty's dad George plays a really pretty spot-on impression of Crispin Glover with all the kinds of strangeness that Glover brings to the character. Why did it make sense for these performances to be so close to the ones in the film?

John: That's a great question. What we talked about was embracing what's the actors provided in the film, just to fully embrace what they were doing. At the same time, each of the actors that we have in the musical has to make the performance their own. Otherwise, it'll be uninteresting, unmoving. Also, their performances are really helped by the music because obviously, in the film, no one sings. For example, Hugh Coles singing this little song My Myopia in a tree, which is such a genius song about his own narrow perspective on life and how he's just so myopically in love with one person, this one girl, Lorraine.

Hugh took what he embraced in the film and then made that his own. That is really how we approached it all. Roger, of course, gives a magnificent performance, truly one of the great performances but same thing happened there whereas we were developing the musical, we were really actively writing songs for Roger as we got-- Glen and Alan recognized what a brilliant voice Roger had and really wanted to write for that voice and that person who's in it. That's another way they that we did this.

Bob: To John's credit, he never once told anybody, any of the performance do it the way it is in the movie, never. He always let the actors, as he said, make the part theirs, find their place in it, and the show was way better for it.

Brigid: We were talking about Roger Bart's performance, there as Doc Brown and we have one of the songs that he performs. It's called It Works. It tracks with a scene in the film when the DeLorean first appears out of thin air. Let's hear a little bit of that.

“MUSIC - Roger Bart: It Works”

It's a time machine?

Wait a minute, wait a minute, Doc

Are you trying to tell me that you built a time machine out of a DeLorean?

Well, if you're going to build a time machine into a car

Why not do it with some style?

I'm the architect of tick tock tech

A frequent flyer on a cosmic trek

I sorted through the quarks and quirks

And for once I know I made a thing that really works

It's a time machine that goes both ways

To new tomorrows and to yesterdays

It's a car for the stars like Captain Kirk's

And for once I knew I made a thing that really works

It works, it works, it works

In terms of the vernacular, it's spectacular

Because it works, it works, it works

And now I've found my glory in this stainless steel DeLorean

It's gratifying knowing I was first, because it works

Hey Doc, who are the girls?

I don't know, they just show up every time I start singing

Brigid: We're going to get to that in just a second but before we talked about the dancing girls, Alan, what can you tell me about writing this song?

Alan: Actually, again, this was a very early song that was written. Glen and I just loved the catchphrase, it works, because Doc, in a sense, all he ever wanted in his life was for it to work, something, finally something works. That was just that was screaming at us for a song. We actually wrote something early on that was quite different than this but it was the same idea.

John: We were in first reading and we had two weeks of rehearsal and the other song that Alan is describing, unlike I said to Glen, "Glen, this is the '80s and we really need something that sounds like the '80s, something like weird science, like she's blinding me with science, some kind of funky." He's like, "Okay, got it." The next day, he walked in, sat down at the piano, started banging up the piano and that's when that sound, it was the same idea, same thought, it works, just filtered through the '80s mindset.

Brigid: I'll pick up on where we were feeding it down, we heard Doc Brown reacting to the dancing girls who show up on the stage who become a theme, they show up on a stage anytime Doc Brown breaks into the song. Tell us a little bit about what that joke is all about and how it evolves throughout the show.

Bob: It evolved. Part of it was just goofing around during rehearsals, where Roger was saying, "These girls, they just show up when I'm singing in the shower." They kept riffing on and I kept thinking, "This ought to be in the show." John started thinking, "Yes, this ought to be in the show," and it's in the show. It's just such a wonderful manic idea and it helps explain the whole tone of the musical because it goes from being very heartfelt, there's scenes that have a lot of heart and there are scenes that are totally goofy.

There's scenes that are a celebration of the movie and then there's just this kind of Mel Brooks vibe that happens every once in a while. We put it all together and it works.

Brigid: Well played. This set design by Tim Hatley is absolutely spectacular. There are lots of lights and projection screens, these really detailed backgrounds that light up at different points, but of course, the standout element is naturally the DeLorean. A review of the West End production in The Guardian said, it really does seem as if the DeLorean is defying the laws of theater, if not the space-time continuum. What conversations did you have about what the show needed to do technically to be a success?

John: One thing I will say that I thought when I read the script the first time that one of the great things that Bob did was he made the DeLorean speak, which was really important for time travel purposes and all of that exposition that in film, you can just do it on the camera and show the dates changing. That was a key thing, and in fact, during the readings that were as we were developing the show, we just had one of the actresses in the ensemble wear a fancy silvery jacket and stand in the middle of stage and say the lines.

We knew that when she was getting laughs that, oh, we were on to something. Okay, we don't even need a car. Okay, cool. I told the producer at that time, "This is how high schools across America will eventually do Back to the Future: The Musical in their high school, just have one of the actress play the play the DeLorean."

Brigid: I want to talk briefly about some of the characters that you develop in a different way in the musical than we're in the film, the character who maybe is most developed from the film to the musical version is Goldie Wilson, who plays a black character who went from being a busboy in 1955, to the town mayor in 1985. In the musical, he gets a really great big number with Gotta Start Somewhere. Before I play a little bit of that, Bob, tell me why you decided to give his character a little bit more of a presence.

Bob: Unlike theater, where you get to do these workshops and put stuff in front of an audience. In a movie, you just go and you say your prayers, you cross your fingers, you say, "I hope this works." Well, the actor Donald Fullilove who played Goldie Wilson was marvelous. He's only on screen for six or seven minutes, but he made a lot out of that appearance, and everybody remembers him saying, "Mayor, that's a good idea, I could become mayor." Audiences love that, so I'm thinking we got to make a meal out of this because you don't even ever see the character in the '80s in the movie.

In talking to Alan and Glen, we were kicking around ideas, but I was saying, "We got to make a bigger deal out of Goldie Wilson." These guys go off and they write Gotta Start somewhere, which is something that brings down the house every single shot.

Brigid: Well, let's hear a little bit of Gotta Start Somewhere from the musical, Back to the Future.

“MUSIC - Cedric Neal: Gotta Start Somewhere”

Mayor Goldie Wilson

I like the sound of that

What are you waiting for?

Pick yourself up off the floor

If you don't respect yourself

Won't get it from no one else

No shame in working hard

Let them know that's who you are

Though I'm low man in the room

I'm still the best one with this broom

This ain't no step and fetch it

It's all part of the climb

There's a train, I'm going to catch it

It's a matter of time

But you gotta start somewhere

You gotta start somewhere

You gotta get going or you're never gonna get there

And once you get moving

Brigid: That's not the only plot change you make, you made e a couple of other plot changes that are probably make sense in a more modern context. Doc Brown does not confront Libyan terrorists. Marty McFly does not teach Chuck Berry about rock and roll. Did you make those decisions? Did you think that those were important to modernize?

Bob: No, it wasn't a question of modernizing it at all. It was a question of what can you actually do on the stage. That was always in my head. I said, "I don't want anybody to see the show and say, 'Well, that's just kind of a mediocre version of what they did in the movie.'" The idea of doing a terrorist chase with the Libyans and gunfire, that's never going to work on the stage no matter what, so I thought of something else. We actually tried to Chuck Berry's phone call in our early rehearsals, and it was just too awkward, we decided let's just not do it, and it played better.

Brigid: Well, we're going to have to leave it there for now. Bob Gale, Alan Silvestri, and John Rando are part of the creative team behind the incredibly creative musical, Back To The Future. It opens on Broadway tomorrow, August 3rd. Thank you so much for joining me.

Alan: Thank you.

Bob: Thank you for having us.

Brigid: Tomorrow, the Knockout Round is about to begin and that's when things will get really interesting in the World Cup. We'll be joined by soccer commentator and host, Rebecca Lowe. That's on All Of It on WNYC.

 

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