That its plot doesn't make sense isn't really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let's face it, if you've ever paid attention to its story, you're going to have some questions, just like you might have with “The Magic Flute.”
You can't complain about the rock part of the billing either; There's some pretty magical guitar and some fairly harmonized vocals.
Translations to film and theater have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 film showed us Tina Turner in top form, enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, featuring her flying Tommy and her galloping pinball machine, was a visual innovator, buoyed by excellent performances. Even the coldest and roughest revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander TheaterLong since renamed “The Who's Tommy”, it offers the excitement of great poppy songs.
Who is Tommy really? And from whom? Despite all the incarnations of it, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend's infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the imagination of the ear. Largely freed from the weight of literality, the album didn't need to make sense to make history.
Nowadays, however, unless you're a die-hard fan who automatically gets excited about every phrase and lyric, you might want something called musical theater to offer more than an all-out assault on the senses. This production, directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff, will not provide that, as it is less interested in trying to convey the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal images.
To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some darkness. 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 his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Upon witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses the ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against the wrath of his parents and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). He also makes him, for a musical, a strange protagonist, who spends most of his time looking at a large, symbolic mirror.
To solve that problem and demonstrate his dissociation, the authors divided Tommy into three coexisting incarnations. The 10-year-old version (Quinten Kusheba, alternating with Reese Levine) is, if possible, even less receptive, baffling many doctors who apparently failed his psychiatry courses. Searching for a cure, his distraught father leads him, as is often the case, to a prostitute and heroin addict named Acid Queen (Christina Sajous). Only after she promises to “destroy his soul” does Dad think better of it.
But if Tommy is still what the famous (and now problematic) lyric calls “that deaf, dumb, blind boy,” he is not without feelings. As a teenager, his ability to respond to her vibrations makes him a “pinball wizard” and somewhat of a celebrity. Emerging from the broken mirror of his childhood, he becomes, in Ali Louis Bourzgui's cold interpretation, a symbol of the possibility of reintegration, recovery, and rock stardom: a young adult with a cult.
This parade of strange plot points and narrative perplexities passes rather quickly; perhaps, in just over two hours, too fast, since the story is difficult to follow and swallow.
That's why I find it more profitable to think of “Tommy” not as a chain of events but as a dream that you are observing from a place inside someone's amygdala. That person, of course, would be Townshend, who grew up in London at 22 Whitehall Gardens, not far from Tommy's house at 22 Heathfield Gardens. He recently told The Times that “Tommy” is probably “a memoir in which I sort out my childhood stuff.” Although his abuse, he said, was at the hands of his “horrible” grandmother, not his “negligent and careless” parents, he evidently suffered enough trauma and exploitation to become a model for Tommy.
The strange melodies and lyrics through which the adult Townshend processed that trauma make the show moving when delivered on the right scale. Ambivalence is the keynote. There is no excuse for the harm others did to her, and yet, as with Tommy, that harm is also what gave her his gift. (“Illness will surely take the mind/Where minds normally can't go,” the boy sings on the aptly titled “Amazing Journey”). On the other hand, Townshend, or at least the avatar of him here, discovers that “freedom lies in normality.” This is the opposite of rock's countercultural stance; In the end, the one to whom Tommy sings the hymn “Listening to You” is not a crowd of admirers but his mother.
McAnuff's production does not go through such subtleties. The entire warm, emotional end of the spectrum has been removed from the show, leaving only black, white, and bright yellow. Even the string quartet that was part of the 1993 orchestration has been eliminated. Also missing from that version: the flight that was so effective and poetic as a representation of Tommy's inner aspirations.
Instead, the keynote of the staging is provided by Peter Nigrini's projections, including live video, that sweep across David Korins's skeletal, shifting stage. (The pinball machine is so thin it looks like it's made of K'nex.) Amanda Zieve's lighting is deliberately cold and harsh.
There is also no attempt at complexity within the strict parameters of the production. The images are a catalog of clichés. Tommy's security guards wear Sarafina Bush SS-style coats. 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 passed from hand to hand as the doctors examine Tommy. I admit that the Acid Queen's spinning wheel is an unexpected gesture, but it is disconcerting. Is she a destiny?
If so, your message to your colleagues should perhaps be: you will feel overwhelmed. No matter how loud and well the performers sing, no matter how frenetic they dance to Lorin Latarro's dystopian choreography, they rarely emerge from the production's flood of senses with any expressiveness intact.
Still, lovers of rock concerts with tons of effects may still like “Tommy,” even if it seems counterproductive to parrot the shows' aesthetics in a musical that implicitly criticizes stadiums as places of thoughtless idolatry and fascist violence. What I missed amid all that overemphasis was some sense of humanity, a couple of violins balancing the guitars, a touch of real Townshend. Because when everything is an effect, no matter how brilliant, none can be special.
Who is Tommy?
At the Nederlander Theatre, Manhattan; tommythemusical.com. Duration: 2 hours 10 minutes.
