The Who's Tommy Broadway Reviews

31 years after its acclaimed Broadway debut, Des McAnuff, the original director and co-librettist with Pete Townshend, revisits The Who’s Tommy with a sharper focus on human relations, and a design team committed to creating a spectacle through scenic imagination rather than scenic bulk. As a result, the saga of little Tommy Walker, told through Townshend’s genius words and music, gains greater emotional impact than ever.

The quaking revival of Pete Townshend’s seminal rock opera, which opened Thursday night at the Nederlander Theater after nearly three decades away, really is an espresso martini of a show after a chamomile-tea season of musicals. Everything about this exhilarating production shakes you awake and leaves you buzzed: Knockout singing, superbly inventive stagecraft and a star-making performance from 24-year-old Ali Louis Bourzgui as the Pinball Wizard that’s the most exciting New York stage debut in years. I hope the Nederlander’s carpets are regularly vacuumed. Because for two hours and 15 minutes, my jaw became all too well acquainted with the floor.

Taking his second stab at this seminal if tricky material, director Des McAnuff (who won the Tony Award for his first attempt in 1993) has wisely hired some of theater’s smartest wizards (including scenic designer David Korins, projection director Peter Negrini, lighting designer Amanda Zieve and sound designer Gareth Owens) to give the show its unusual look, full of both realistic sets and technological visuals that delight the eye throughout the two-hour, two-act show.

Let’s just say for a moment that McAnuff and crew on-stage and backstage have morphed into pinball wizards themselves. As such, they’re hitting record-breaking numbers on the flashing and whistling revival machine they’re playing.

Indeed, the sets pop, the choreography is tight, and “Tommy” brims with fun. Maybe it’s a little nostalgic for classic rock fans. But I’ll take this over a lot of musicals with unhummable songs and flat scores. It’s really a tribute to Townshend, who set the bar high for rock after hearing “Sgt Pepper” and its consequent releases by other groups in the late 60s.

That’s when this revival serves up “Pinball Wizard.” It’s one of the work’s most famous hits by Pete Townshend, who wrote the music and lyrics and co-authored the book with director Des McAnuff. Between the chronically catchy song, full-tilt performances, and movement to match, the number is electrifying. The great news is that what precedes and follows this moment also stirs and tickles the senses. That’s the way this rock opera rolls, as it spins the story of a boy so deeply damaged by life – first by his parents and later by his abusive uncle and creepy cousin – that he nearly shuts down completely.

Truth be told, I was not expecting to be as bowled over by this story, or this revival, as I was. But there’s no arguing with talent, and with so much prowess on and off the stage, Tommy is an electric paean to rock immortality, and talent wherever one can find it.

With a superb cast headed by Broadway newcomer Ali Louis Bourzgui as Tommy, the “deaf, dumb and blind kid” – most of whatever language less-than-acceptable by today’s standards has been retained – and Alison Luff as his mom Mrs. Walker, Tommy feels less like a stick-to-what-works revival than a top-to-bottom reimagining. Nearly all of it works beautifully.

The deaf and blind would miss a great deal of what makes Tommy work, but it might actually help to be a little dumb. It’s best, at least, not to think too hard about this show, which is dramaturgically unwieldy—drawn out in the first act, rushed and overstuffed in the second—and sometimes doesn’t make sense. (McAnuff sets a big chunk of it in “the future,” which the projections make clear is our future, even though the action is explicitly set in post–World War II England.) And yet, despite these problems, the show works, and its epic choral finale somehow feels genuinely rousing and healing. As musical theater, Tommy is limited. On its own terms, it’s often sensational.

Still, the songs, which are often bite-size, remain as distinctive as they’ve ever been (which is why “The Who’s Tommy” can also be effective in a semi-staged format, as evidenced by Josh Rhodes’s production at the Kennedy Center five years ago). The score was very theatrical for a chart-topping rock band in the late ’60s, but it’s also very rock by Broadway standards, even now. The company walks that line, at least vocally, better than the one from 1993, which was more Broadwayfied, and the orchestra, which is as loud as it needs to be, plays with a precision that does not forsake energy and the joys of riffage. What this “Tommy” is preaching might be a little murky, but when the entire cast lines up to face the audience and belts the “Listening to You” finale, by golly, you believe.

In 1975,Tommy was adapted into a deliciously delirious film that featured the tagline, “Your senses will never be the same.” Now, The Who's Tommy carries that torch forward in its own radical, one-of-a-kind adventure that truly has to be seen to be believed. See it, feel it — you won't forget it. Grade: B+

Pete Townshend’s prescient 1969 rock opera “Tommy,” a horrifying if ultimately transcendent howl of anger and anguish at the damage wrought on the boomer generation by their war-scarred parents, has returned to Broadway in a new, born-in-Chicago production from director Des McAnuff that will sock you right in the gut. Many a replay can be expected at the Nederlander Theatre, whatever else bounces off the current Broadway bumpers.

The term “rock opera” is amorphous, but perhaps no other show comes as near to defining it precisely as this one. Mr. Townshend’s songs are authentic rock dating from the heyday of one of the genre’s revered bands, not the watery pap that often passes for rock in contemporary musicals. And even the most outlandish plots of Verdi are no more sensationally dramatic than the story of “Tommy,” with its beleaguered but triumphant hero, its rogue’s gallery of foes and its frankly bizarre story.

The Who’s hardcore fans may like these hard-charging spectacles the most in “Tommy.” There are certainly some terrific stage effects. But I appreciate the few quieter moments – maybe these reflect the spirituality that Townshend was aiming for — when Quinten Kusheba (who portrayed the ten-year-old Tommy on the night I attended) sings a piercingly clear rendition of “See me, hear me” without any of the rock noise.

This is the risk, or simply the fact, of live theater: Watch Elton John and Tina Turner in Ken Russell’s 1975 film of Tommy, and you’re watching something fixed in time. Go to the Nederlander, and you’re watching strata of time interact via living bodies sweating in a real space, which will always give rise to the question of why this thing now? But this friction isn’t necessarily a bad thing — it can produce results across the spectrum in terms of a play’s resonance. With Tommy, if the dissonance is sometimes distancing, it’s also fascinating. Though I spent long stretches of the show intrigued and amused rather than earnestly rocking out, I was never not entertained. I had plenty of questions, but I also had a damn good time.

Today, though, unless you’re 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 — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t 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.

There are standout performances. Mop-headed Ali Louis Bourzgui, who plays Tommy as a young adult, has stage presence and good pipes, and Alison Luff, playing Tommy’s mother, Mrs. Walker, brings real grit to her one solo, “Smash the Mirror.” Maybe if you’d missed the ’70s, when The Who’s exceptional album stirred the hearts of kids making enough noise to change the world, you wouldn’t care that this production of “Tommy” is basically for old people, and not for a new generation.

The visuals, however, primarily depend on Peter Nigrini’s constantly changing projection designs. In many cases, historic photographs of an urban England are used, and Nigrini has manipulated them significantly through color and distortion to blend seamlessly into more abstract visualizations of Tommy’s consciousness. Some tableaux are breathtaking; others are rather pedestrian, especially when Nigrini’s projections recede and McAnuff’s direction relies on Sarafina Bush’s unimaginative costumes and Lorin Latarro’s equally mundane choreography.