Photograph by Sarah McCosham
I love live theater but eschew musicals. I’m not sure why, as I am the type of person who narrates everything in her head and often breaks into spontaneous song—two things central to musical theater.
After seeing Back to the Future: The Musical last weekend, I think my stance on musicals is this: live always, and the weirder the better.
BTTF was both of these things, unapologetically. It was high energy and nostalgic in all the best ways (well, mostly, but that’s personal opinion! The Marty-and-his-mom subplot was really dialed up in the Broadway in Cincinnati show in a way that made my mom-of-teen-boys self cringe so much I lost focus on the musical a few times! Effective cringe? Absolutely.)
The screenplay has its bumpy spots, but in the musical (as with musicals), everything is dialed up several notches. Simple scenes of dialogue elevated by songs with dance routines and visual cues available because of this in-person, high-drama medium.
Photograph by Sarah McCosham
I’ve always enjoyed BTTF for the fantasy of it all: time travel and ’80s nostalgia and sharp writing. Broadway in Cincinnati brought the drama with lots of special effects that felt both high-tech and kitschy, which is very on brand for BTTF, I think. Either way, I thoroughly enjoyed the show and it’s been on my mind in the time since, and isn’t that the whole point of theater?
Theater has long been a place of acceptance and encouragement; a place where anything is possible and showing emotions through movement and song is commonplace. It’s refreshing, really, to experience so much energy and emotion over the span of a couple hours.
The world feels very heavy right now and when I went to see the musical, I’d had an especially heavy week. Heavy. Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth’s gravitational pull? But for three hours in the Aronoff, I was someplace else. How marvelous!
If you hurry, you can catch BTTF before it closes on Sunday. But if you miss it, Broadway in Cincinnati has a very alluring season lineup and you better believe I will be in the audience for The Notebook in October.
Broadway in Cincinnati, Aronoff Center for the Arts,, 650 Walnut St., downtown (513) 621-2787
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