Tag Archives: Zan Berube

Can “Back to the Future” Fly as a Musical?

Review: Back to the Future The Musical at Belk Theater

By Perry Tannenbaum

The stars aligned – and Hollywood’s star system functioned flawlessly – when Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd, both proven TV commodities, came together in 1985 to star in the year’s top-grossing blockbuster, Back to the Future. You could easily “see” Fox as Marty McFly if you tuned into Family Ties, where the diminutive 23-year-old was already starring as a son who was more grounded, pragmatic, and strait-laced than his hippy dad. Likewise, the lean and bony Lloyd was perpetually disheveled and long-haired enough on Taxi to ace an audition for the pivotal role of Doc Brown, the eccentric nuclear physicist who unlocks the secret of time travel.

Doc and Marty live in Hill Valley, a town that is perfectly rigged to enable time travel back-and-forth from 1985 to 1955, according to the unique formula concocted by screenwriters Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale The writing/directing team clearly liked wheels: they put Marty on a skateboard and put wheels into time travel – in a customized DeLorean that was as fuel hungry as a space rocket. No less than the force of an atomic bomb was required to achieve lift-off at the magical speed of 88mph.

Anybody remember Oldsmobiles?

Stolen plutonium fuels the DeLorean in its maiden flight to 1985, but if you don’t already know, it’s Hill Valley and its highest, most visible landmark that powers the kooky, suspenseful journey back. More than 30 years after the box office smash – and a franchise that includes two film sequels, video games, amusement park rides, and a lunchbox – Gale wasn’t going to hand over his story to anyone else when the time was ripe for Back to the Future The Musical.

As fans of the film will soon discover at Belk Theater, Gale’s parental care for his brainchild hasn’t prevented him from tinkering extensively with its workings. Doc’s DeLorean is now equipped with voice recognition, with a smart-ass voice that tells McFly he can no longer change its settings. In other vehicular news, Marty’s grandpa will no longer run into him with his jalopy and the lad’s skateboard usage will be seriously curtailed. Nor is there any traffic onstage from Libyan terrorists, so Marty’s letter to Doc, to be acted upon 30 years later, now has a different safety warning.

The magical family snapshot that Marty carries along with him to 1955, providing useful updates on whether he and his sibs still exist in 1985, is gracefully finessed. No, we can’t see closeups of the photo at the Belk like we could on a big screen, but Doc’s lab is thoughtfully outfitted with an overhead projector so we can track changes on a smaller pulldown screen.

While the telltale snapshot is upscaled, so is the buffoonery of Marty’s dad, George McFly. A conspicuous loser in both time slots, carrying over a Jerry Lewis gawkiness into each, Burke Swanson feasts on George’s timid nerdiness, threatening to steal the show whenever he appears. Next to her clownish husband, Zan Berube suffers some shrinkage in 1985 as Lorraine, Marty’s long-suffering mom, but she conspicuously flowers as the younger teen in 1955, evidently the queen bee of Hill Valley High.

There she is glamorous as the ideal of both George and his nemesis, Biff Tannen*, the town bully – and she is dangerous because she fancies Marty, a mortal threat to the space-time continuum and his existence. Aided by a bodacious Campbell Young Associates wig, Ethan Rogers makes for wonderfully cartoonish Biff, looking like a monstrously morphed Archie Andrews, with flecks of Bluto, Curly from Oklahoma, and The Donald. This Biff ought to be the toast of the town in New York.

With so many delicious distractions – and so many, many, many songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard – Don Stephenson as Doc and Caden Brauch as Marty struggle to stay at the forefront throughout Act 1, where pacing reaches cruising speed but never really sustains it. We pine, we ache for the DeLorean whenever it’s parked out of sight.

But the payoff for the increased development of Mom and Dad, before and after marriage, lands nicely as Act 2 accelerates to its finale. We’re not assailed with frantic jumpcuts or chases, but so many difficulties and complications remain to be resolved as 10:04pm inches closer at the fateful courthouse clock tower. Before the lightning strikes, hopefully lavishing its gigawatts on the DeLorean at its magical speed, Biff must be thwarted, Mom and Dad – with nothing to build on yet in their relationship – must consummate their first kiss, and Marty must take fond leave of all the key people in his life.

Preferably, with his own survival assured. Then all he needs to do, in the dark of night in a high wind driving his DeLorean at 88mph, is thread a needle at precisely the right moment. Piece of cake.

It’s easy to forget the emotional weight of the film’s relationships and time-traveling farewells 35 or more years after savoring its pulsating adventure, so they all came back forcefully for me on opening night. Although they aren’t Rodgers & Hammerstein, the songs by Silvestri & Ballard mystically magnified that weight – even if I sometimes wished the revving-up sounds of the DeLorean might drown them out.

While his headgear and goggles still brand him as a mad scientist, Stephenson as Doc veers more toward personifying the physicist as a visionary. His vision of the “21st Century” impacts comically as cockeyed optimism rather than eccentricity, and his “For the Dreamers,” an anthem for losers, resonates rather poignantly with the sorry loser futures faced by George and his present-but-unborn son.

Fox’s fidgety acting style, his three little jumps before making an exit – or simply moving – have become avatars for seemingly every leading man on tour or on Broadway in a musical. Those hiccups are intact in Brauch’s embodiment of Marty McFly, punctuated with all his skateboard and DeLorean business, but he also recaptures Michael J’s anguish and urgency as he counsels his own dad on how to be a man. Yes, that’s the knack that Fox brought to movies from his stint on Family Ties, but here the stakes are immensely higher – as high as they can be – in a cosmic comedy!

At times, the time traveling intervention with Dad is cringeworthy. Marty is basically telling Dad how to bed his mom so he can be born. But with music, Brauch can heighten his role from advisor to motivator. Brauch’s powers of inspiration are magnified when he plants idea of running for mayor in the mind of the kid sweeping the floor at the diner where Marty first encounters his dad-to-be (a fine “Gotta Start Somewhere” cameo for Cartreze Tucker as Goldie Wilson).

When he sings “Put Your Mind to It” to Dad in Act 2, Marty must skirt the Scylla and Charybdis of phoniness or peppiness. We don’t want him sounding like huckster Max Bialystock singing “We Can Do It” in The Producers or evoking a Richard Simmons workout session.

So yeah, besides those hops, Brauch also needs to have that youthful brashness we associate with Fox and McFly. Elevating a shallow and tepid rock song into a motivating “We Can Do It” mantra, Brauch pours on all the energy and earnestness needed to make Marty take flight.

Nor does it hurt when the DeLorean levitates.

*No relation

“Six” Brings Back Henry’s Iconic Queens, Dressed to Slay

Theatre, , , , , , , ,

Review: Six The Musical at Blumenthal Performing Arts

By Perry Tannenbaum

Many of the people who know nothing more about King Henry VIII of England than the number of wives he married erroneously assume that he executed them all. Not so. Only twice did he behead a wife – no more often than he divorced or, more accurately, annulled one of their marriages – so four of the dears died of natural causes. Still a half dozen is a large portion of partners and death-do-us-part oaths for any grown man, especially one who lives out his life very much in the public eye.

You don’t earn a pass, even as a king, for summarily ordering your wife to be beheaded just because you refrained on other occasions. Nor is it a moral lapse if, three wives and six years later, you do it again after thinking it over.

What’s important, then, is the solidarity of these wives as Toby Marlow & Lucy Moss bring them all back to us in SIX THE MUSICAL. No matter that the ladies’ villainous tormentor has been dead for 476 years – and barred from appearing this week at Belk Theater as the touring version, adorned with Tony Awards for best costume design and musical score, spends a holiday week in the Queen City. These resurrected queens are out for revenge.

Queen-spired by Beyoncé and Shakira, Lily Allen and Avril Lavigne, Adele and Sia, Nicki Minaj and Rihanna, Ariana Grande and Britney Spears, plus Alicia Keys and Emeli Sandé, they are here to SLAY!! Glittering in eye-popping skirts, dresses, and slacks worthy of hardcore heavy-metal thrashers. Dazzling tops, bustiers, shoulder plates, ruffles, collars, and sparkling sleeves ready for the battlefield Wicked platform shoes and boots. State-of-the-art hand mics.

Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anna of Cleves, Katherine Howard, and Catherine Parr are not here to play – not even with each other. They are here to ask us to decide, night after night, which of them suffered most under cruel King Henry’s hand. This is their battle, their consecrated competition.

If you are capable of biting your nails over the outcome of this high-stakes, high-decibel throwdown, then you’re likely to believe that I’m fully acquainted with all the inspirational pop queens I’ve just catalogued. Throngs of fanatics were no doubt pre-sold on Marlow &Moss’s handiwork before opening night at the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, for their high-decibel responses often increased my difficulties in discerning what these dead queens were telling us.

A good portion of the screamers and shriekers had no doubt primed themselves by listening repeatedly to the cast album before the show or – like I did afterwards – by counting on Spotify and Apple to post the lyrics as it played. My recommendation would be to follow their example, though the sound crew’s performance on opening night was far better than average.

Intelligibility aside, as well as pertinence to the issue at hand, each of the six solos the queens sing has an unmistakable élan, and all six of the women onstage are powerhouses when the spotlight is most piercingly upon them. Of course, a Charlotte crowd is going to favor its own, and Amina Faye’s return to the Belk Theater stage as Jane Seymour, seven years after she took home a Blumey Award there for her stirring portrayal of Sarah in Ragtime – and a subsequent Jimmy Award up on Broadway – is already a triumph.

Clarity and intense emotion are already baked into “Heart of Stone,” so Faye is doubly set up for success with the Belk audiences. It’s the only song besides “I Don’t Need Your Love,” sung with searing urgency by Sydney Parra as Catherine Parr, that rises to the level of heartfelt testimony, a strange commonality for the two queens who have the least reason to feel aggrieved by Henry. Buoyed by this handicap, they are welcome counterweights to the prevailing glitz and silliness, and Faye is better to my ears than her cast album counterpart, Natalie Paris, who is comparatively plastic. Or pop plastic, if you don’t warm to that brand of singing.

Gerianne Pérez is surprisingly saucy as the senior – and longest reigning – among the royals, Catherine of Aragon, singing “No Way” in retelling how she rejected divorce and annulment from Henry. Nor does she fade into the background after taking the first solo, indisputably the most confrontational and contentious in the group. Her primary adversary, Zan Berube as Anne Boleyn, is by turns weird, wacky, lewd, and irreverent in “Don’t Lose Ur Head,” confiding that she lost her head only after giving some. Could be me, but it seemed like she was bragging, not gagging.

By the time we reached Terica Marie as Anna of Cleves and Aline Mayagoitia as Katherine, the idea that these badass queens were trying to point up their marital sufferings – or anything else besides telling their stories with varying degrees of attitude – was pretty much forgotten. Paradoxically, that made it easier to enjoy Marie’s “Get Down” as she went from down-low grooving to childish taunting. Anna seemed to be adopting Aragon’s playbook. Despising Mayagoitia’s all-men-are-alike messaging in “All You Wanna Do” came just as naturally as she narrated her way, chorus by chorus, to the hatchet man.

Interesting that the two women whom Henry beheaded get the most annoying songs. It’s a nice little hint from Marlow & Moss that the man was provoked. But then, so was the woman I heard complaining that, for 100 bucks a ticket, we should be able to understand the lyrics that these dead-queens-resurrected-as-rockstars are singing. Personally, I discarded such naïve notions at the last Avett Brothers concert I attended. At least at SIX, you can remain seated for the whole 80 minutes.