roughdraftatlanta.com: Tim Hatley is no stranger to film-to-musical adaptations.
The set and costume designer has worked extensively on productions on the West End and Broadway, including shows like “Shrek the Musical” and “The Bodyguard,” an adaptation of the 1992 film of the same name. One of his more recent works is “Back to the Future: The Musical,” based on the iconic 1985 movie directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale.
3 comments:
I really liked what Tim Hatley had to say about how instead of recreating the book or movie it was about telling the story in a new way, and how in order to create the theatrical production of a story that was a book or movie, he puts it in a box and mixes it to then create a theatrical production of said story. I felt it was really interesting to read about how the most thing affected when adapting from a book or movie is the change in set and how much you have to condense how many times the scene changes the location, as in a theatrical setting the hardest thing to change over and over again and to go back and forth is the sets and location and that the main challenge when adapting a book or movie into a theatrical production. I really enjoyed reading about Hatley’s process and how he adapted stories into theater!
I saw Back to the Future: The Musical on the West End. I am not always a fan of musicals that come from movies, however I thoroughly enjoyed this production! It contained some of the best technical elements that I have ever witnessed. Through the clever use of lighting, scenic, video, and sound, I felt fully immersed throughout the entire show. To top it all off, I enjoyed the pop-rock score that reminded me of the movie’s iconic soundtrack. This was an insanely large production, and I can’t even begin to imagine the countless hours that it took to pull it off. My favorite parts were definitely when the Delorean was onstage. I am still fascinated by how it moved across the stage so naturally. It truly looked like the car was drifting around at high speeds. My jaw fully dropped at the end of the show, when the Delorean flew over the audience and did a full rotation upside down, with the actors in it. To this day, I am still trying to figure out how they did this illusion. There were many other fantastical moments like this throughout the show. I also loved the clocktower scene, where a mix of physical scenery and projections are used to make the audience think that Doc is climbing up endless stairs.
I’ve never actually seen the Back to the Future musical, but from this interview with the show’s set and costume designer, Tim Hatley, I’m definitely a lot more interested in seeing it! I really love the way he elaborates on transferring a film to theatrical adaptation on stage. There’s a lot more difficulty I hadn’t thought about in this process, primarily scene changes because sets are much more limited in theatre than they are in film. It makes sense that Hatley was also behind the stage adaptation of Shrek the musical, because though there is much criticism that can be applied to the silliness and absurdness of the show, it actually works incredibly well as a stage adaptation. Additionally, I thought the comparison Hadley used to describe film as two dimensional whereas theatre is three dimensional was incredibly introspective. Overall, this just goes to show how much thought is put into both theatre and film as artistic mediums.
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