NEWS: Tony Award winner, Roger Bart will play ‘Dr Emmett Brown’ in the world premiere of BACK TO THE FUTURE The Musical


October 15, 2019
NEWS: Tony Award winner, Roger Bart will play ‘Dr  Emmett Brown’ in the world premiere of BACK TO THE FUTURE The Musical

Tony Award winner, Roger Bart will play ‘Dr Emmett Brown’ in the world premiere of BACK TO THE FUTURE The Musical, which will open at the Manchester Opera House on 20 February 2020 for a strictly limited 12-week season, finishing on 17 May, prior to transferring to the West End. This comes on the day Christopher Lloyd, the original ‘Dr Emmett Brown’ in the Back to the Future film trilogy comes to Manchester to pass on the keys to the DeLorean Time Machine to Roger.

Roger Bart joins the previously announced Olly Dobson as ‘Marty McFly’, Hugh Coles as ‘George McFly’, Rosanna Hyland as ‘Lorraine Baines’ and Cedric Neal as ‘Goldie’.

Roger Bart has had a prolific career on stage and screen. His most notable TV and film credits including The Stepford Wives, The Producers, the recurring role of George Williams in Desperate Housewives (ABC), for which the cast won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series, the recurring role of Roger Riskin in Episodes (BBC 2), Vice Principal Nero in A Series of Unfortunate Events (Netflix) and currently Judge Curtis Wilson in Good Trouble (Freeform). Roger’s Broadway credits include Carmen Ghia (Tony nomination) and then Leo Bloom in The Producers, Xanthias in The Frogs, Dr Frederick Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein, Tony Delvecchio in Disaster The Musical (all original Broadway productions). Bart was the original singing voice of Hercules in the animated classic film of the same name and this summer took on the nemesis role of Hades in the stage premier of Hercules at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park. Go the Distance, the hit song from the feature film, was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Song. In 1999, Roger won the Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Musical for his portrayal of Snoopy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown on Broadway. He will be making his British stage debut in BACK TO THE FUTURE The Musical.

Roger Bart said of playing Dr Emmett Brown, “I am thrilled to be here in the great city of Manchester, England to introduce to the world this extraordinary incarnation of this hilarious and heart-warming story. Playing the role of Doc Brown, made iconic on film by the brilliant Christopher Lloyd, is going to be the adventure of a lifetime. After all, at this stage of my life, who doesn’t want to go back in time?”

Based on the Universal Pictures/Amblin Entertainment film, BACK TO THE FUTURE The Musical will have a book by Bob Gale and new music and lyrics by Emmy and Grammy Award-winning Alan Silvestri and six-time Grammy Award-winning Glen Ballard, with additional songs from the film including The Power of Love and Johnny B. Goode.

BACK TO THE FUTURE The Musical will be directed by Tony Award-winning director John Rando (Urinetown, On The Town), alongside the multi Tony and Olivier Award-winning design team of Tim Hatley (set and costume design), Hugh Vanstone and Tim Lutkin (lighting), Gareth Owen (sound) and Finn Ross (video), with choreography by Chris Bailey, musical supervision and arrangements by Nick Finlow and Illusions by Chris Fisher. Orchestrations will be by Ethan Popp, with dance arrangements by David Chase.

Back to the Future the movie was released in 1985, starring Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd as Dr Emmett Brown. The film grossed $360.6 million (£279 million) at the box office worldwide and the total box office for all three films in the Back to the Future franchise was $936.6 million (over $1.8 billion in today’s money).

Marty McFly is a rock ‘n’ roll teenager who is accidentally transported back to 1955 in a time-travelling DeLorean invented by his friend, Dr Emmett Brown. But before he can return to 1985, Marty must make sure his high school-aged parents fall in love in order to save his own existence.

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Photos by Phil Tragen