That the plot doesn’t make sense is not “Tommy’s” problem. When it was first released as an idea album in 1969, it was ultimately marketed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, in the event you’ve ever paid attention to this story without addiction, you’ll need some questions, similar to you probably did with “The Magic Flute.”
You cannot complain concerning the rock a part of the bill either; you may hear some magical guitar playing and a few justly harmonized vocals here.
Film and stage translations brought additional pleasure. The 1975 film gave us Tina Turner in great form – suffice it to say. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball, was a visible breakthrough, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, thicker ones revival, which began on Thursday on the Nederlander Theatrelong renamed “The Who’s Tommy”, it offers the thrills of a giant, poppy strip.
Who exactly is Tommy! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes essentially the most of Pete Townshend’s fiendishly catchy songs stays the one which takes place within the imagination of the ear. Largely free of the burdens of literalism, the album did not have to make sense to create a story.
Today, nevertheless, unless you are a die-hard fan who routinely sends chills down your spine with every credit and lyric, chances are you’ll want something called musical theater that gives greater than a full-on assault on the senses. This production – directed, like the unique, by Des McAnuff – fails to achieve that, because it is less involved in trying to convey the story (McAnuff and Townshend’s) than in obfuscating it with unforgiving noise and banal images.
To be fair, a story set during World War II and 20 years after probably advantages from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). However, when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner of war camp and kills his lover, whom his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired within the meantime, the boy experiences trauma. Witnessing the shooting, he immediately loses his hearing, speech and vision, leaving him a shell of a toddler, defenseless against the fury of his parents and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). This also makes him, for a musical, a unusual character who spends most of his time staring right into a large, symbolic mirror.
To solve this problem and show his dissociation, the authors divided Tommy into three co-existing incarnations. The 10-year-old version (Quinten Kusheba alternating with Reese Levine) is, if possible, much more unresponsive, confounding many doctors who apparently failed their psychiatry courses. Looking for a cure, his distraught father takes him, as he often does, to a prostitute and heroin addict called the Acid Queen (Christina Sajous). Only when she guarantees to “tear his soul to pieces” does Dad change his mind.
But if Tommy stays what he famously (and now problematically) calls “that deaf, stupid, blind child,” he isn’t without feelings. As a teen, his ability to respond to vibrations turns him right into a “pinball wizard” and thus something of a celeb. Emerging from the broken mirror of his childhood, he becomes – within the cool performance of Ali Louis Bourzgui – an emblem of the opportunity of reintegration, recovery and rock stardom: a young adult with a cult following.
This parade of strange plot threads and narrative intricacies passes quite quickly – perhaps at just over two hours, too quickly since the story is difficult to follow and harder to swallow.
So I feel it’s more profitable to consider “Tommy” not as a series of events, but as a dream that you just’re viewing from a spot in someone’s amygdala. That person would, in fact, be Townshend, who grew up in London at 22 Whitehall Gardens – close to Tommy’s home at 22 Heathfield Gardens. He recently told The Times that “Tommy” might be “a memoir in which I work through my childhood memories.” Although, he said, his abuse was the work of his “terrible” grandmother and never his “negligent and careless” parents, he clearly experienced enough trauma and exploitation to turn out to be a job model for Tommy.
The earworm melodies and strange lyrics through which the adult Townshend worked through this trauma make the show moving when presented at the appropriate scale. Ambivalence is the keynote. There is not any excuse for the harm others have done to him, and yet, as with Tommy, that harm has also provided him with this gift. (“The disease will surely take the mind/Where minds usually cannot go,” the boy sings on the aptly titled “Amazing Journey”). On the opposite hand, Townshend, or at the very least his avatar here, states that “freedom lies in normality.” This is the alternative of rock’s countercultural attitude; in any case, the one to whom Tommy sings the hymn “Listening to You” isn’t a crowd of admirers, but his mother.
McAnuff’s show doesn’t trade in such niceties. The entire warm, emotional end of the show’s spectrum was cut away, leaving only black, white and shiny yellow. Even the string quartet that was a part of the 1993 orchestration was eliminated. This version also lacks the flying, which was as effective and poetic because the depiction of Tommy’s inner aspirations.
Instead, the primary notes of the staging are Peter Nigrini’s projections, including live video, which fall onto David Korins’ skeletal, shape-shifting set. (The pinball machine is so spindly it looks prefer it’s fabricated from K’nex.) Amanda Zieve’s lighting is intentionally cold and harsh.
There can also be no attempt at complexity inside strict production parameters. The images are a catalog of clichés. Tommy’s bodyguards wear SS-style coats from Sarafina Bush. A projection of a large box of Lux soap flakes hovers over an unidentifiable place where Mrs. Walker is doing laundry. Racks of obviously fake test tubes are passed from hand to hand as Tommy is examined by doctors. I admit that the Acid Queen’s reel is an unexpected gesture, however it’s stunning. Is she Fate?
If so, her message to the opposite heroes needs to be: You shall be overwhelmed. No matter how loudly and well the performers sing, regardless of how madly they dance Lorin Latarro’s dystopian choreography, they rarely emerge from the spectacle’s sensory deluge with their expression intact.
Still, fans of effects-heavy rock live shows might like “Tommy,” even when it seems self-defeating to repeat the aesthetics of an arena show in a musical that implicitly criticizes arenas as places of mindless idolatry and fascistic violence. What I used to be missing in the course of all this over-emphasis was a little bit of humanity, a pair of violins balanced on guitars, a little bit of real Townshend. Because when all the pieces is an effect, regardless of how sensible, nothing could be special.
Who is Tommy
At the Nederlander Theater in Manhattan; tommythemusical.com. Duration: 2 hours 10 minutes.
