\n<\/p>\n
That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with \u201cTommy.\u201d When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let\u2019s face it, if you\u2019ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you\u2019re going to have some questions, just as you might with \u201cThe Magic Flute.\u201d<\/p>\n
Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there\u2019s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.<\/p>\n
Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form \u2014 enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater<\/a>, long since rebranded as \u201cThe Who\u2019s Tommy,\u201d offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.<\/p>\n Who\u2019s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend\u2019s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear\u2019s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Today, though, unless you\u2019re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production \u2014 directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff \u2014 won\u2019t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.<\/p>\n To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents\u2019 rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n To solve that problem, and demonstrate his dissociation, the authors split Tommy into three coexisting incarnations. The 10-year-old version (Quinten Kusheba, alternating with Reese Levine) is, if possible, even more unresponsive, baffling many doctors who apparently failed their psychiatry courses. Seeking a cure, his anguished father brings him, as one does, to a prostitute and heroin addict called the Acid Queen (Christina Sajous). Only after she promises \u201cto tear his soul apart\u201d does dad think better of it.<\/p>\n But if Tommy remains what the famous (and now problematic) lyric calls \u201cthat deaf, dumb and blind kid,\u201d he is not without feeling. In his teens, his ability to respond to vibrations turns him into a \u201cpinball wizard\u201d and somehow thus a celebrity. Emerging from the broken mirror of his childhood, he becomes, in Ali Louis Bourzgui\u2019s cool portrayal, a symbol of the possibility of reintegration, recovery and rock stardom: a young adult with a cult.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This parade of odd plot points and narrational perplexities passes quite swiftly \u2014 perhaps, at little more than two hours, too swiftly, as the story is hard to follow and harder to swallow.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why I find it more profitable to think about \u201cTommy\u201d not as a chain of events but as a dream you are watching from a perch inside someone\u2019s amygdala. That person would of course be Townshend, who grew up in London at 22 Whitehall Gardens \u2014 not far from Tommy\u2019s home at 22 Heathfield Gardens. He recently told The Times<\/a> that \u201cTommy\u201d is probably \u201ca memoir in which I work out my childhood stuff.\u201d Though his abuse, he said, was at the hands of his \u201cawful\u201d grandmother, not his \u201cneglectful and careless\u201d parents, he evidently suffered from enough trauma and exploitation to make himself a model for Tommy.<\/p>\n The earworm tunes and weird lyrics through which the adult Townshend processed that trauma make the show moving when offered at the right scale. Ambivalence is the keynote. There\u2019s no excusing the damage done to him by others, and yet, as with Tommy, that damage is also what provided him with his gift. (\u201cSickness will surely take the mind\/Where minds can\u2019t usually go,\u201d the boy sings in the aptly named \u201cAmazing Journey.\u201d) On the other hand, Townshend, or at least his avatar here, finds that \u201cfreedom lies in normality.\u201d This is the opposite of rock\u2019s countercultural pose; in the end, the one to whom Tommy sings the anthem \u201cListening to You\u201d is not a crowd of admirers but his mother.<\/p>\n McAnuff\u2019s production does not traffic in such subtleties. The entire warm, emotional end of the show\u2019s spectrum has been lopped off, leaving only black, white and garish yellow. Even the string quartet that was part of the 1993 orchestration has been eliminated. Also missing from that version: the flying that was so effective and poetic as a representation of Tommy\u2019s inner aspirations.<\/p>\n Instead, the top staging note is provided by Peter Nigrini\u2019s projections, including live video, that tumble across David Korins\u2019s skeletal, shape-shifting set. (The pinball machine is so spindly it looks as if it is made of K\u2019nex.) The lighting by Amanda Zieve is deliberately cold and harsh.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nor is there any attempt at complexity within the production\u2019s strict parameters. The imagery is a catalog of clich\u00e9s. Tommy\u2019s security guards wear SS-style greatcoats by Sarafina Bush. A projection of a giant box of Lux soap flakes looms over the otherwise unidentifiable spot where Mrs. Walker is doing laundry. Racks of obviously fake test tubes are relayed hand-to-hand when Tommy is being examined by doctors. I\u2019ll grant that the Acid Queen\u2019s spinning wheel is an unexpected gesture, but it\u2019s bewildering. Is she a Fate?<\/p>\n If so, her message to her fellow characters perhaps should be: You will be overwhelmed. However loudly and well the performers sing, however frenziedly they dance Lorin Latarro\u2019s dystopian choreography, they rarely surface from the production\u2019s flooding of the senses with any expressiveness intact.<\/p>\n Still, lovers of rock concerts with tons of effects may yet like \u201cTommy,\u201d even if it seems self-defeating to parrot arena-show aesthetics in a musical that implicitly criticizes arenas as sites of thoughtless idolization and fascistic violence. What I missed in the middle of all that overemphasis was some sense of humanity, a couple of violins balancing the guitars, a touch of real Townshend. Because when everything\u2019s an effect, no matter how brilliant, none can be special.<\/p>\n The Who\u2019s Tommy<\/strong>
At the Nederlander Theater, Manhattan; tommythemusical.com<\/a>. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n