Join Eric Stewart, Back to the Future’s Head of Props, Behind the Scenes

It’s Eric Stewart’s job to carefully attend to every need of one of the most dazzling and exciting stars on the New York stage.

But more about the DeLorean in a moment.

As the head of props for Back to the Future on Broadway, Stewart also looks after plenty of other objects nearly as iconic as the time-traveling sportscar. They include Marty’s skateboard, the guitar Marty plays at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance (anachronistically a 1958 Gibson ES-345 in the movie) and the glowing rods of plutonium that, in the story, provide the 1.21 gigawatt charge that makes time travel possible. “The plutonium, especially, we check that every day just to make sure that it does light up the way it's supposed to light up,” he told Perry Sook on The Broadway Show.

As Stewart explained, the JVC video camera that captures Doc Brown’s first time-traveling experiment has, unfortunately, been dropped a couple of times backstage. “Finding a replacement of this has been a challenge. We found one in the U.K. that was shipped over that got held in customs.” The team is current scouring eBay for another one.

Stewart studied performance at a small community college in Tennessee but eventually found himself gravitating backstage. The more time he spent behind the scenes, the more he liked it. “I realized that it doesn't matter what I look like or what I sound like to do this part of the job. So it was much easier for me to do this.”

In 2009, Stewart was head carpenter and rigger for the national tour of Avenue Q. Eventually he started taking props-department roles on shows such as Wolf Hall, Tootsie and Company. Part of what appeals to Stewart is the variety of the work. “You get to do a lot of really big, fun things,” he said, “but also do little fun, small detailed stuff, like all of the smaller props.”

The props department is so essential to the running of a Broadway show it’s easy to take their contribution for granted. Stewart and team populate the onstage world of Back to the Future with its things, ranging from the scenic (illuminated signage for Twin Pines Mall, Doc Brown’s laboratory equipment) to the plot-centric (Marvin Berry and the Starlighters’ instruments, a paper sign saying “Kick me!”), as well as a huge array of such everyday whatsits as cigarettes, pens and pencils—all of which need to be carefully itemized and accounted for.

And then, in a category of its own, there’s the car. With its boxy steel body and gull-wing doors, the DeLorean is an icon of the Back to the Future franchise and something of a celebrity itself. Sightings of the real thing are relatively rare—only 9,000 stainless-steel DeLoreans were manufactured at a factory in Northern Ireland before the company folded in 1982. (Its founder John Z. DeLorean was facing trial for allegedly attempting to sell cocaine to buoy the firm's finances.) The creative team behind the Back to the Future musical modeled their DeLorean on scans and photographs of a vehicle belonging to Steven Wickenden, a Back to the Future superfan in Deal, England.

Just as a regular car requires periodic oil changes, fluid top-ups and brake pad inspections, the stage DeLorean requires regular TLC too. “We are in charge of basically all the aesthetics on the car,” said Stewart. “So anything that looks nice or pretty—we're in charge of. But there's also electrics 'cause the car lights up; automation is in there too. So it's props, carpentry and electrics and sound. There's speakers in the car as well. When they are ready for the car, we will push the car out.”

Stewart’s team is also in charge of testing the car’s sophisticated pneumatic system, which partly accounts for the car’s impressively agile maneuvers. “One of the things that we do is we air up the car,” said Stewart. “There are pneumatic knives that lock the car into tracks in the floor that are air-controlled. First thing that props does is make sure that we have plenty of air in the car to make sure that those knives can come up and down the way that they're supposed to and don't get stuck.”

In the Broadway community, there’s a saying: props is tops. “Props is great,” Stewart agrees. “I like props a lot. I'm gonna stick with props for a while.”