Back to the Future has a future on Broadway. The smash musical on London’s West End will be staged in New York in 2023, say the producers of the musical based on the iconic 1985 film starring Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd.
Casting and venue for the Broadway version has not yet been determined. The news broke on Wednesday via Twitter, with a teaser trailer urging fans to “synchronize your watches” as two actors were seen traveling through time in a DeLorean. The London musical was adapted from the original screenplay by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale, with music and lyrics by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard.
The Back to the Future musical premiered at the Manchester Opera House in March of 2020 before moving to the Adelphi Theatre in London’s West End in September of that year, starring Olly Dobson and Roger Bart. The production, directed by Robert Zemeckis, captured an Olivier Award for best new musical.
Also directed by Zemeckis, the 1985 film version was produced by Stephen Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and distributed by Universal Pictures. It narrated the story of Marty McFly, an adolescent accidentally sent back to the year 1955 by Emmett “Doc” Brown, a “mad scientist” friend.
While marooned in the past. McFly accidentally prevents his future parents from falling in love and must find a way to reconcile them to insure his existence. Also included in the cast were Lea Thomson and Crispus Glover.
The film’s theme song, “The Power of Love,” was supplied by Huey Lewis and the News.
The 1985 Back to the Future film reportedly earned more than $220 million in global receipts. Two sequels, released in 1989 and 1989, yielded another 0 million to that total.
In 2007, the original picture was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry.