GREAT SCOTT!

How do you make a car hit 88mph on the West End stage? We go behind the scenes to find out

- Dean Gibson

RARELY do the worlds of automotive and theatre collide. Aside from the occasional racing-car reveal or a prop for a professional dancer to jump around on, you won’t normally find a car taking pride of place on stage. But when you’re bringing one of the most popular movies of the eighties to the West End one that features a car as an integral part of the plot then things get complicated.

Back To The Future: The Musical opened to rave reviews at London’s Adelphi Theatre in September 2021, and has since gone on to wow audiences of all ages with its mix of songs old and new, sharply choreographed dance routines and cutting-edge special effects, all of which are designed to capture the spirit of the original 1985 movie. Of course, chief among those attractions is the DeLorean in which Marty McFly travels back to 1955. 

But just how do you get a car on stage, let alone jump the space-time continuum when it hits 88mph? Audience members have certainly been stumped; some think it’s camera trickery, others believe there’s more than one prop car and some are adamant that it’s a real DeLorean. Well, Auto Express has been behind the scenes, and we can reveal some but definitely not all of the show’s secrets.

First things first: there’s only one car used on stage, and it’s not a real DeLorean there’s too much on-stage trickery involved for it to be safely stuffed into a real vehicle. We quiz production manager Simon Marlow who has previously managed the staging of big-ticket shows such as The Phantom Of The Opera, The Lion King and Mamma Mia! about how he and his team used decades of experience to bring this DeLorean’ to life.

Difficult