Weekly Margin 2024, W2: Back To The Future: The Musical, Appropriate

1/10/23: Back To the Future: The Musical

What: Exactly what it says on the tin.

And? It's like an AI tried to write a musical and then gave up. Most of the songs are incoherent (not only from an "I can't understand the lyrics because they're drowned out by the orchestra" perspective but also from an "Is this a song? Is this the same song? Did the last song end or do they not end until we hit a choreographic button? What is this? Why does Marty keep repeating the last sentence spoken to him in an angsty belt? Does someone think that's a song hook? Why are we here?" perspective). I don't think there are any actual characters up on stage. There are so many moments that have the shape of jokes without actually being jokes (or being, you know, funny). The jokes that are there are mostly from the original screenplay, and the production somehow manages to either misunderstand them or overplay them. Some of the car stuff is cool. The dancing is good. The act one finale song, "Something About That Boy," is the only good new song in the whole score: it's competent pastiche, it actually functions like a song, and more importantly it functions like a musical theater song: story moves forward, we've got ironic juxtaposition, humor. It didn't feel like an act one finale, but I guess we can't have everything. But major MAJOR snaps to Biff understudy Marc Heitzman, who stepped into the role in the middle of act one, with no chance for a fight call, and dove into the complicated dance and fight choreo of the act one finale. That's some good Broadway.

Roger Bart, Casey Likes, and the Delorean as Doc Brown, Marty McFly,
and the Delorean. Photo by Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

1/11/23: Appropriate

What: 2nd Stage presents playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's much-anticipated Broadway debut. Appropriate had its first New York run in 2014 at Signature with a different cast and production team. Three adult siblings and their families gather at their recently deceased father's decrepit Arkansas plantation to manage the estate sale and unearth some alarming relics, as well as old grudges.

And? A consummate production. The structure and unfolding ugly truths are perfectly built, the dialog is sharp and bitter, the cast is expertly directed by Lila Neugebauer, and the sound design by Bray Poor and Will Pickens is especially powerful and foreboding. And the audience is led on a delicate tightrope of empathizing with a character before getting knocked to the nets below, on the reminder that everyone here is one kind of monster or another.

Michael Esper, Elle Fanning, Natalie Gold, Alyssa Emily Marvin, Corey
Stoll, and Sarah Paulson as Franz, River, Rachael, Cassidy, Bo, and Toni.
Photo by Joan Marcus.