Theatre in Review: The Who's Tommy (Nederlander Theatre)

	Ali Louis Bourzgui and company. Photo: Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman.

The Who's Tommy is back, as big and shiny and empty as ever, ready to overwhelm the audience with sound and fury signifying very little. It's also looking a little long in the tooth. Adapted from the famous concept album, with music and lyrics by Pete Townshend (additional music by John Entwistle and Sonny Boy Williamson II), the show's 1993 Broadway debut was seen as a groundbreaking event. Frank Rich, who really should have known better, called it "the authentic rock musical that has eluded Broadway for two generations" and "a surprisingly moving resuscitation of the disturbing passions that made Tommy an emblem of its era," mentioning the My Lai Massacre, the trial of the Chicago Seven, and the Charles Manson murders.

OK, boomer; the weakness in this portrait-of-a-generation argument is that it exposes The Who's Tommy as a tabula rasa on which one can project virtually any anxiety. In retrospect, however, the show was a turning point. Before it, musicals that repurposed classic pop tunes -- mostly bio dramas like Leader of the Pack and Buddy -- were reliable underperformers. (I am drawing a veil over Beatlemania, the mother of all tribute acts, which enjoyed a lengthy run.) But Tommy, staged with unmistakable expertise, then and now, by Des McAnuff (co-author of the book with Townshend), drew crowds, planting the idea that Broadway no longer needed to make its own kind of music, rock or otherwise; one could just turn to the Billboard charts for inspiration. From there, it was a short step to Mamma Mia! and its increasingly frail progeny.

The Who's Tommy isn't a jukebox musical in the sense of Rock of Ages or Once Upon a One More Time, shows in which hit tunes are shoved, usually inelegantly, into contrived plots. But, conceived as a song cycle with a vaguely articulated sequence of events, it nevertheless twists itself into a narrative pretzel onstage. The first half hour, set in London during and after the Battle of Britain, is a gripping, if standard, bit of melodrama, in which Captain Walker, returning home from a German prisoner-of-war camp after being presumed dead, catches his wife with a lover who is quickly shot dead. The captain is acquitted but Tommy, who witnessed the manslaughter, is traumatized, losing the ability to see, hear, and speak.

So far, so good, although much of the action is staged in pantomime with underscoring since there are only a few songs to cover these events, and their lyrics are thin and repetitious. The following sequence, in which Tommy is passed around and subjected to a battery of medical tests, is genuinely affecting. But trouble sets in when Captain Walker, desperate for a solution, is persuaded by a couple of apparent strangers to consult the Acid Queen; somehow, delivering a small boy into the arms of a drug-addicted whore doesn't seem like the smartest idea. But there you are: She has a famous number and the fans must be served.

As Tommy demonstrates his uncanny skill at pinball, causing a major freakout from a chorus already given to seizures at the slightest development (Lorin Latarro choreographed, vigorously), the show suffers from the authors' inability to make dramatic sense of the album's loose-limbed structure. "I'm Free," in which Tommy regains his senses, begs the question of how, having been virtually comatose for a decade and a half, he emerges as a fully formed personality capable of complex thought. Most of the second act, in which Tommy's pinball expertise turns him into a kind of celebrity/messiah figure, is a shallow, superficial indictment of a shallow, superficial society. (Tommy has always been a thinly disguised meditation on the agonies of being a rock star, the title character's uncanny skill at pinball making him as popular as, say, The Who.) Listening to the album, one likely doesn't ask too many plot-related questions; onstage, they are inescapable.

This probably matters little to audiences who come for the classic (and undeniably catchy) rock score delivered by powerhouse singers, amped up by flashing lights and vivid projections. David Korins' scenic design uses a matrix of vertical and horizontal bars to create a kind of traveling iris effect, a cinematic approach augmented by the zooms and pullback of Peter Nigrini's projections. Nigrini delivers a tsunami of images -- a vast airplane hangar, a ghostly black-and-white negative of London row houses, and luridly colored streetscapes and church interiors sinking into the stage -- which look like the coolest record album covers you've ever seen. He also layers in tabloid headlines, newsreel footage of wartime London, and live video feeds when Tommy hits the talk show circuit and his neglected parents plead their case to the BBC. Amanda Zieve's lighting is acutely attuned to the music, creating rock-concert hits, bumps, and chases that reliably pump up the energy; it's a fine debut for a designer who has racked up many assistant and associate credits on Broadway. Gareth Owen's sound design delivers plenty of punch while retaining an enviable intelligibility. Sarafina Bush's costumes are fine period creations in the first half, accurately tracking changes in fashion as the action moves from the 1940s to the '60s. She has a bit of trouble conceiving a coherent look for scenes set in the unspecified future -- it looks rather like mod, Carnaby Street London -- but even so her work is attractive.

McAnuff, who stages the show with military proficiency, deploys his actors like an army of robots, driving them to hit their marks and belt their notes, but at least he has recruited some solid pros to do his bidding. Tommy is a blank, a placeholder at center stage, but Ali Louis Bourzgui gives him some power and presence. Adam Jacobs' Captain Walker has an authentic air of weary desperation. John Ambrosino is suitably creepy as the pedophile Uncle Ernie (a character the show has no idea what to do with) and Bobby Conte has a rude, edgy, Teddy-boy quality as Cousin Kevin, who torments Tommy then becomes his head bodyguard. In thankless roles, the ladies are less effective: Alison Luff is a solidly anguished Mrs. Walker and Christina Sajous works hard to drum up some menace as the Acid Queen. The kids who play Tommy's younger selves (each role is double-cast) spend the evening being pushed, spun like tops, and subjected to leering, menacing adults in implied sexual abuse scenarios; I hope their parents know what they're doing.

The show moves like a guided missile, and McAnuff knows how to earn a hand, whether via enhanced lighting or sound cue or by bringing the entire cast downstage to belt their heads off; if he's full of tricks, they're effective. Tempus fugit, however: The audience applauds the first notes of "See Me, Feel Me" and "Pinball Wizard" just as their grandparents did when the orchestra broke into "I Want to Be Happy" and "Tea for Two" at No, No, Nanette The difference, of course, is the book of No, No, Nanette makes sense. (Well, more or less.) Anyway, The Who's Tommy, despite showing its age, will probably please fans of the score and tourists looking for a nostalgic night out; others can look back at the moment when, to some at least, it seemed as if rock would revolutionize the Broadway musical, not dilute it. --David Barbour