How exciting! In the summer of 2019, previews of Back to the Future: The Musical, which won the Olivier Award for Best Musical, will begin at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway. In this production, actors Roger Bart and Hugh Coles are resuming their roles from the London run. Coles will play George McFly, Marty McFly’s father, and Bart will play Dr Emmett Brown. We should expect an announcement shortly on who will portray Marty, made famous by Michael J. Fox. In honour of the day that served as the backdrop to Back to the Future Part II, in which Marty McFly and Doc Brown travelled to the future, the show’s creators made the announcement today.
The preview performance took place on March 11, 2020, in Manchester, England. After five days, previews were called off because of the COVID-19 outbreak. The show’s opening night in London’s West End was September 13, 2021, after a successful run in New York. The show’s production design was hailed by critics across the board, and it ended up receiving one of seven nominations for an Olivier Award. Coles and Bart have been working on this project from the very beginning. Atlanta and Death in Paradise are the most current films in which you may catch Coles.
For his role as Snoopy in the 1999 production of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Bart received a Tony Award, among many others. His rendition of “Go the Distance” from the film Hercules earned him a Screen Actors Guild award in addition to nominations for the Golden Globe and the Emmy. He has been in several films and television shows, such as ABC’s Desperate Housewives and the films The Stepford Wives, The Producers, and Trumbo. Bob Gale, who co-created and co-authored the film trilogy, wrote the book for the musical, while Alan Silvestri, who scored the movie, and Glen Ballard penned the music and lyrics. Songs from the film are featured in the musical as well, such as “The Power of Love” by Huey Lewis and the News and “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry.
Gale made a public announcement in which he said: For example: “If Bob Zemeckis and I went back in time to 1980 and told our younger selves that the script they were labouring to write would become a Broadway musical 43 years later, they’d toss us out of their office and label us insane…. We were blown away by the London production, and we have no doubt that the Broadway version, led by the incomparable Roger Bart and Hugh Coles and featuring the magnificent music of Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, will be even more impressive.
On October 28, tickets will be available to the general public.