At the Lied Center: Taking 'Back to the Future' from screen to stage

It’s been more than four decades since Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis began to develop a script about time travel.

Almost 40 years later, “Back to the Future," the 1985 movie that came from that script, remains a beloved cultural touchstone, which lives on not only in film but in the musical version that Gale and Zemeckis began developing more than a decade ago and brought to the stage in 2021.

"Back to the Future,” which will open a six-day, eight-performance Lied Center for Performing Arts run Tuesday, holds up, Gale said, because of the universality that underlies the tale of Marty McFly, who takes a DeLorean car turned into a time machine back to the 1950s when his parents were in high school.

“At the heart of it, I think, is the very human story, the very human impulse to wonder, where did I come from? What did my parents do to get together? What did they do on their first date? And what if they hadn’t gotten together?” he said.

“When you're about 8 years old, it suddenly comes clear to you, 'Oh, my goodness, my parents actually were children once like me. They must have been screw-ups just like me.' That transcends all cultures. It transcends all generations. Everybody's always going to think about that. Because we had such a fabulous cast, and because Bob Zemeckis did such a fabulous job directing it, everything just came together.”

“Back to the Future” generated a pair of sequels. But, Gale said, he and Zemeckis decided a couple of decades ago that there wouldn’t be a “Back to the Future Part IV” because the first three movies were pictures of their time and doing another 20-plus years later would require significant changes in cast and story approach.

But, when Zemeckis and his wife saw the musical version of the Mel Brooks' film “The Producers” on Broadway in 2005, she asked if he and Gale had considered turning “Back to the Future” into a musical.

Zemeckis and Gale decided to kick that idea around and eventually decided to give it a shot, recruiting Alan Silvestri, who has done the music for all of Zemeckis’ movies, and songwriter/lyricist Glen Ballard to compose new music for the musical.

Gale handled “the book” and set about transforming the screen version of “Back to the Future” for the stage.

“The first order of business was to go through the movie and say, what can we do? But most importantly, let's figure out what we cannot do,” he said. “The first thing that went was a skateboard chase. Because, OK, we need a guy to play Marty McFly. He has to sing, he has to dance, he has to be funny, he has to act. We can't expect he's going to be able to do skateboard stunts. And even if he could, that's risky.”

Next out was the terrorist attack, gunfire and car chase, the latter impossible to do on stage. And the dog and baby were out, for obvious reasons. But there were a couple of elements that had to remain in the musical, no matter how challenging they may have been to stage.

“We knew we had to have the DeLorean,” Gale said. “We had to have it go 88 miles an hour. We didn't know how we were going to do it, but we had to figure that out. And we had to do a version of the clock tower scene. If you're going to go see ‘Back to the Future,' those are two elements that you absolutely have to see. Thanks to a tremendously talented creative team, we pulled them off, and you're going to get your socks knocked off when you see how we did it. It's really impressive.”

Adding new songs also required some story changes.

"There's a particular song in Act Two, which was such a good song that Glen Ballard had written, and it didn't really have a place. But he said, ‘I just feel like we need a song where Doc kind of tells us who he is.' The song was so good that I completely rejiggered Act Two so that we could make sure that that song would have a special place and could really shine on its own.”

The musical, however, preserves some of the songs from the movie’s iconic soundtrack.

“From the movie, we have ‘Power of Love,’ ‘Back in Time,’ ‘Johnny B. Goode,’ and ‘Earth Angel,’" Gale said. "We knew everybody is going to want to hear those songs. Of course, ‘Earth Angel’ and ‘Johnny B. Goode’ are elements of the story. They had to be in there. And you can’t ever think of ‘Back to the Future’ without the two Huey Lewis songs.”

And, while it retains the gist and basic structure of the film, there were other requirements for the stage that screenwriter Gale only became aware of as the production was put together.

“The director would say, 'Hey, Bob, you need to write a scene that doesn't include Marty so that he has time to change his wardrobe for the enchantment under the sea dance,'” Gale said. "That’s why there are intermissions and act breaks in musicals, which we don’t even think about with movies.”

“Back to the Future” opened in London’s West End in 2021, where it won the Lawrence Olivier Award for best new musical, and on Broadway in 2023, where it received a pair of Tony nominations.

The North American tour of the musical began in June and will run through August 2025, providing audiences across the country the opportunity to do something most people today haven’t had the chance to do — see “Back to the Future” in a theater.

“Most people have not seen ‘Back To The Future’ in an audience because they're too young,” Gale said. “So the fact that you're in a theater with 1,000 or more people with you, they're laughing at the jokes, they're applauding when George punches out Biff and all these other things. It's the great communal experience of why we like to go to the movies and see them with an audience."