Plenty of famous movies have been translated into musicals, but few require the technical expertise and resources needed to bring a big budget sci-fi tale to the stage. Back To The Future is that show, adapted from the beloved 1985 teen fantasy film that maintains a loyal following nearly 40 years later. You know the story — teenager Marty McFly accidentally gets sent back in 30 years to 1955 in his friend Doc’s time-traveling DeLorean, and once there, he unintentionally gets caught between his parent’s meeting, which could completely undo his life in the future.
The production began as a 2020 successful run in Manchester, UK before transferring to London’s West End where it’s been playing since 2021. But as the musical’s Olivier Award-nominated sound designer Gareth Owen notes, the spaces in London and New York are significantly different. The West End’s Adelphi Theatre is very long and narrow, while Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre is wide and shallow. This sharp contrast in venue dimensions led to rethinking the sound design, primarily the use of surround sound.
“In London, the surround is primarily side surround coming in from left and right, but in New York, the theatre architecture makes a rear surround system far more practical,” says Owen. “We did, however, decide to use the same d&b audiotechnik KSL main P.A. that we used in London – marking its debut use on Broadway, I believe.”
Sound Effects Galore
To give the illusion the car is moving — and yes, it’s a full car onstage — video projections by Finn Ross on screens upstage and occasionally a front scrim wall are utilized, with a turntable to reposition the car at different angles to give the effect it’s racing down suburban and rural streets. Here, sound effects complete the illusion of movement and generate excitement for what’s transpiring. But there are many other moments that require visceral sound effects, such as scenes in Doc’s laboratory and the Enchantment Under the Sea dance.
Replicating the intricate sound design of a big budget movie is daunting, and in fact, rather than using fewer sound effects, Owen used more. “We ended up adding way more effects than the movie had — probably ten times more,” he says. “Once we started adding more stuff we discovered a sonic landscape for the show that just made sense, so we just kept going.” (Owen’s Broadway team includes A1 Chris Lusseman and A2 Jordana Abrenica.)
Owen is no stranger to detailed sound design. He has worked on shows like Summer, Come From Away, and Spring Awakening. He’s been nominated for four Tony Awards and won Best Sound Design of a Musical for MJ The Musical in 2022.
“I very much enjoy doing cinematic sound design for musicals; indeed, many would say it’s my calling card,” says Owen. “However, I completely underestimated the extent of the sound effects for this show. We have over 300 individual SFX cues, constructed out of nearly 1,500 audio files. The sound effects folder on the QLab machine is hundreds of gigabytes.”
Early on in the process of creating the sound design for Back To The Future, he was given access to the original movie sound effects. He received a copy of the original movie minus the original music or dialogue; simply the SFX tracks.
“It was quite eye-opening how simple yet effective they were, and it made me realize quite how much of the heavy lifting is done by Alan Silvestri’s orchestral score,” remarks Owen. “My goal was to use the movie audio as a reference but to recreate everything from scratch. Indeed, the only effect in the entire show that’s ripped from the movie without prejudice is the sound of the flux capacitor. Everything else is a new creation.”
While there are approximately 300 SFX cues in the show, there are just as many console cues, many of which, according to Owen, are orchestral mix cues to adjust orchestral balance as they move through numbers. (The production features music and lyrics by Silvestri and Glen Ballard.) Although the musical is loaded with sound effects, the ones most intricate or difficult to create were actually associated with the famed car.
“Bizarrely, I’d say that the hardest thing to create in the show was actually the pre-show and intermission radio shows that play in the foyer and auditorium,” reveals Owen. “A huge amount of work went into these as they run more than two hours in total and include jingles, period appropriate music — 1985 for walk-in and walk-out, 1955 for intermission — and a chatting DJ. There also news reports, weather forecasts and traffic updates. It took forever to construct something that received our writer Bob Gale’s seal of approval.”
Miking and Mixing…
There are 26 cast members onstage and 18 musicians in the pit, including, of course, an electric guitar player for the big Van Halen-like solo that Marty plays at the school dance, confusing the kids who have no idea what he’s doing. Each cast member wears a DPA 4066 mic with the principals double-miked with Countryman B3s for backup. The orchestra pit is loaded with DPA 4099s for strings and 4011s for brass and reeds. Drums are mainly miked with Audix, and all the electronic gear is Radial DI’d. The electric guitar is DI’d with a Radial J48. The car itself does not have mics in it as backup or to capture ambient sounds, but Owen says it has plenty of speakers inside. (And yes, near the end of the show, the car does “hover” above the audience for its big moment.)
Mixing-wise, Owen and his team run two Avid S6Ls at FOH coupled to a custom theater sidecar called the S6L-16tc. They maxed out the 384-input total, and all the channels run into a set of DirectOut Prodigy MP processors that handle the conversion and matrix mixing. He adds they have a pair of Allen & Heath DM64s with 32-way expanders running the orchestra monitor system for a total of 192 available channels, but only about 160 are used.
“The orchestra all get individual 40-ch Allen & Heath ME1 headphone mixers, mostly driving Sony MD709 headphones, although the conductor has UE11 in-ears,” he adds. “The drummer also has a custom A&H IP-8 controller to allow more individual adjustment of the drum mix.”
The sound system is almost entirely d&b audiotechnik except for Meyer overhead sound effects and E-V Wings program speakers. Some 219 speakers were used for Back To The Future at the Winter Garden, and according to Owen, that’s only one less than he used on MJ The Musical at the Neil Simon Theatre. Given this large number of speakers, one could be concerned about overwhelming volume (although not as huge as Doc Brown’s massive amp that Marty nearly blows out).
“It’s not about level as much as coverage,” Owen explains. “The quantity of speakers allows us to achieve consistent and even volume and frequency response throughout the whole theater. Very few speakers are driven to anywhere near their maximum volumes.”
Overcoming Challenges
Owen says that the most challenging sequence to design sound for was the climactic clock tower sequence where a younger Doc sends Marty back to 1985. It turned out to be an epic endeavor.
“The amount of visual cues, many of which directly link to lighting and video, as well as time code and click tracks was, at times, truly mind-melting,” says Owen. “There were times during production where I thought we would never get it right. There were a lot of long hours and late nights on this one, I can tell you.”
In order to master the heavy demands for the big clock tower sequence, coordination was crucial. “I think the key moment was working out a dialog between all the departments, so we could function as one cohesive unit,” Owen recalls. “While I wouldn’t take credit for even a tenth of what’s going on here, I can take credit for synchronizing everyone together, locking over 10 minutes of highly complex scene and score into one tightly choreographed technical ballet.”
Owen says that the biggest new thing that he and his team achieved for the Back To The Future musical was utilizing the UnReal Gaming Engine to create the sound effects of the car, both live and in real time. “We take positioning information from the car via automation, convert it to OSC, and then render the car sound effects live,” elaborates Owen. “This means that the car can do whatever it wants in the sound effects track, and considering that we send MIDI data back to lighting and video, the car basically looks after itself.”
