Capturing Rock-and-Roll and the Passions of 1969
by Frank Rich
New York Times
April 23, 1993

The Broadway musical has never been the same since rock-and-roll stole its audience and threw it into and identity crisis. For three decades, from the moment Meet the Beatles usurped the supremacy of such Broadway pop as Hello Dolly!, the commercial theater has desperately tried win back the Young (without alienating their elders) by watering down rock music, simulating rock music and ripping off rock music. A result has been a few scattered hits over the years, typified by Hair and Jesus Christ, Superstar, most of which have tamed the rock-and-roll revolution rather than spread it through Times Square. Until now.

Tommy, the stunning new stage adaption of the 1969 rock opera by the British group the Who, is at long last the authentic rock musical that has eluded Broadway for two generations. A collaboration of its original principal author, Pete Townshend, and the director, Des McAnuff, this show is not merely an entertainment juggernaut, riding at full tilt on the visual and musical highs of its legendary pinball iconography and irresistible tunes, but also a surprisingly moving resusitation of the disturbing passions that made Tommy an emblem of its era. In the apocalyptic year of 1969, Tommy was the unwitting background music for the revelation of the My Lai massacre, the Chicago Seven trial, the Charles Manson murders. Those cataclysmic associations still reverberate within the piece, there to be tapped for the Who's generation, even as the show at the St. James is so theatrically fresh and emotionally raw that the newcomers to Tommy will think it was born yesterday.

In a way, it was. Though the voices and pit band of this Tommy faithfully reproduce the 1969 double album, adding merely one song ("I Believe My Own Eyes"), a few snippets of dialogue and some extended passages of underscoring, the production bears no resemblance to the Who's own concert performances of the opera (which culminated in an appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1970) or to Ken Russell's pious, gag-infested 1975 film adaptation. Instead of merely performing the songs, or exploiting them as general riffs of dance and psychedelia, the evening's creators, who also include the choreographer Wayne Cilento and some extraordinary multimedia artists led by the brilliant set designer John Arnone, using the singing actors to flesh out the drama of Tommy. Better still, they excavate the fable's meaning until finally the opera's revised conclusion spreads catharsis like wildfire through the cheering house.

Both the story and its point are as simple as Peter Pan (with which Tommy shares it's London setting and some flying stunts by Foy). The show's eponymous hero is a boy who is stricken deaf, dumb and blind at the age of four after watching his father return from a World War II prisoner's camp to shoot his mother's lover. Tommy's only form of communication proves to be his latent wizardry at pinball, a talent that soon turns him into a media sensation. As played by Michael Cerveris with the sleek white outfit, dark shades and narcissistic attitude of a rock star, the grown-up Tommy is nearly every modern child's revenge fantasy come true: the untouchable icon who gets the uncritical adulation from roaring crowds that his despised parents never gave him at home.

In this retelling, Tommy is often played simultaneously by two child actors (representing him at ages four and ten) in addition to Mr. Cerveris. The isolated young Tommy's totemic, recurring cry of yearning-- "See me, feel me, touch me, heal me"-- flows repeatedly between inner child and grown man, giving piercing voice to the eternal childhood psychic aches of loneliness and lovelessness. It is this primal theme, expressed with devistating simplicity in Mr. Townshend's score and lyrics, that has made Tommy timeless, outlasting the Who itself (which disbanded in 1982). Yet it is the evil of the authority figures the hero must overcome--a distant father (Johnathan Dokuchitz), a dismissive mother (Marcia Mitzman), a sexually abusive Uncle Ernie (Paul Kandel) and various fascistic thugs--that also makes Tommy a poster-simple political statement reflecting the stark rage of the Vietnam era.

As stages by Mr. McAnuff, that anger is present but the story is kept firmly rooted in its own time, from the forties to the early sixties. The slide projections that drive the production design at first recreate in black-and-white the London of the blitz, then spill into the vibrant pop-art imagery of pinball machines, early Carnaby Street and Andy Warhol painting before returning to black-and-white for televised crowd images that recall the early British rock explosion as witnessed on the "Ed Sullivan Show." Mr. Cilento's compact dances similarly advance from wartime jitterbugging to the fifties sock-hopping of early rock-and-roll movies to evocations of the Mod antics of A Hard Day's Night and its imitators in the sixties.

But the highly sophisticated theatrical style of this Tommy, which coalesces as a continuous wave of song, scenes, kaleidoscopic design and dance, owes everything to musical-theater innovations unknown until the mid-1970s. Mr. McAnuff, whose past Broadway works include the relatively stodgy Big River, and A Walk in the Woods, shrewdly turns to examples set by such directors as Harold Prince, Michael Bennett and Robert Wilson. Here and there are echoes of the mock-documentary superstar sequences of Evita and Dreamgirls, in which abstract scaffolding and bridges suggest a show-biz firmament and a surging mob. As in those cinematic Prince and Bennett shows, the entire company becomes an undulating organism that defines the stage and is always on the fly.

From Mr. Wilson, whose theater experiments have sometimes involved autistic boys eerily resembling the fictive Tommy, Mr. McAnuff and his designers take the notion of threading a few repeated images abstractly through the action: floating chairs, mirrors, the Union Jack, airplane propellers and disembodied Man Ray eyes, not to mention doors and windows reminiscent of sixties rock-album cover art and the hallucinogenic mythology such art canonized. (Sometimes the new incidental scoring takes some hints from Mr. Wilson's musical collaborator, Philip Glass.) These dreamy visual touchstones are constantly reshuffled and distorted throughout Tommy for subliminal effect, reaching their apothesis in an inevitable (and superbly executed) set piece in which the entire theater becomes a gyrating pinball machine celebrating the rebellious hero's "amazing journey" to newfound freedom.

Even in that blowout sequence, Tommy eschews the heavy visual spectacle of recent West End rock operas (and Broadway musicals) to keep its effects lithe and to the point. Often the most evocative sequences are spare and intimate: a candlelit Christmas dinner haunted by the ghosts of family horrors past, an abandoned urban lot in which the Acid Queen (Cheryl Freeman, paying persuasive vocal homage to Tina Turner) is more a feral junkie than a phantasmagoric Gypsy. Dominating the stage instead of being usurped by hardware, the performers can shine as well, from the dazzling Mr. Cerveris, who grows from melancholy youth to strutting pop star, to Ms. Mitzman's powerfully sung mother, Mr. Kandel's sinister Uncle Ernie and the tireless ensemble, its youngest members included. When the time comes for the entire company to sing the soaring final incantation--"Listening to you I get the music. Gazing at you I get the heat"--Tommy has done what rock-and-roll can do but almost never does in the theater: reawaken the audience's adolescent feelings of rebellion and allow them open-throated release. But reflecting the passage of time and Mr. Townshend's own mature age of forty-seven, this version takes a brave step further, concluding with a powerful tableau of reconciliation that lifts an audience of the 1990s out of its seats.