Review: Time-Travel Musical Safety Not Guaranteed Clocks a Win as a Low-Tech Charmer

Broadway has been going back in time for over a year now with Back to the Future’s impressive flying DeLorean and largely forgettable score. For those who don’t mind time travel with fewer bells and whistles, Ryan Miller and Nick Blaemire’s heartwarming and laugh-inducing Safety Not Guaranteed, an adaptation of Derek Connolly’s 2012 film of the same name, offers a lively score, six great performances, and a helluva good time.

Overall, Blaemire’s book follows the movie’s plot, with a couple of notable changes. Seattle journalist Darius (Nkeki Obi-Melekwe) is looking for her next story when she finds a classified ad that reads “Someone to go back in time with me. This is not a joke.” Thinking that the crackpot who wrote the ad will make a good article, she heads to a remote Washington town with her jerk of a boss, Jeff (Pomme Koch), and nerdy co-worker Arnau (Rohan Kymal). They soon discover the ad’s author, an eccentric loner named Kenneth (Taylor Trensch), who hides a prosthetic ear under the flap of his hunter’s cap (smart costume design by Sarita Fellows). Darius quickly finds herself getting wrapped up in Kenneth’s zany world and begins to wonder if he’s as big a nutcase as she thought.

Director Lee Sunday Evans has opted for a simple aesthetic for this tuner, keeping the stage mostly bare to allow for quick scene changes (set design by Krit Robinson) and to showcase the five-member band (music direction by Cynthia Meng).

Miller, lead singer of the alternative band Guster, seems like he’s had a good time composing his freewheeling score of catchy songs that weave in and out of the dialogue. “One Man Wrecking Machine” is an instant earworm, as is the energetic “What’s Your Mission?” Miller wrote the song “Big Machine” for the movie, and Trensch sings the lilting lyrics with charming innocence as he haltingly strums a zither. Miller’s indie-rock style and sensitive poetry blend well with the characters’ stumbling attempts to recapture the past and make human connections.

Speaking of which, Blaemire has made some updates to the romantic storylines. Here, Darius, played in the movie by Aubrey Plaza, sees Kenneth more as a fascinating oddball rather than as a potential love interest. Arnau, on the other hand, is portrayed as a gay man reluctantly falling in love with librarian Tristan (a positively delightful John-Michael Lyles in one of several roles). Tristan is a new addition to the story, but Lyles is such a scene stealer it’s hard to imagine the show without him.

The Arnau-Tristan relationship is a perfect foil to Jeff’s somewhat creepy longing for the woman he came to see under false pretenses. Ashley Pérez Flanagan plays Liz, who had a brief relationship with Jeff 20 years before, but she’s suspicious of his suddenly serious advances. Blaemire’s tweaking of the romantic subplots has resulted in the lovely quartet “Are You Good?,” in which the two couples intertwine their relationships in a tender ballad of attraction and retreat. It’s one of the show’s highlights.

Too bad that Drew Levy’s sound design doesn’t always allow the voices to come through clearly in songs like this. It’s very effective, though, in the climactic final scene along with Reza Behjat’s exciting lighting, Faye Armon-Troncoso’s eye-popping props, and welcome reprises of “What’s Your Mission?” and “Big Machine.” At an hour and 45 minutes, Safety Not Guaranteed proves that you don’t need a DeLorean to make time fly.