It’s a smash, Mrs. Walker, it’s a smash.
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.
Most of us have (thank God) been spared the extent of our hero’s damage from infancy to early adulthood: driven catatonic after witnessing a murder; sexually abused by one relative and tormented by another; mindlessly idolized and exploited both during and after his period as, so goes the lyric, “that deaf, dumb and blind kid.”
But it’s a fable. And as with any great fable, everyone is able to locate themselves within its gaze. It’s McAnuff’s gift to us that in this production, empathy with those who have been ill-used, or those who ache to find their place in life, is inescapable.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★★☆ review here.]
It starts with the employment of technology to clarifying ends. There’s spectacle aplenty, but always suggestive rather than literal. Scenic designer David Korins keeps vertical and horizontal lines in motion to frame the action, echoing the mirror into which Tommy sightlessly gazes. Peter Nigrini’s projections establish place and mood with cinematic montages and a range of colors and chiaroscuro, supplemented by lighting designer Amanda Zieve’s artfully selective palette. Tantalizing associations are made to sources as diverse as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (in the darkest moments of Tommy’s trauma and attempted recovery), and Triumph of the Will (when the Pinball Wizard, restored to consciousness, is elevated to near-messianic status).
How Gareth Owen’s sound design manages to convey every word of every lyric is a mystery to me, but he enables us to follow the action with full understanding of character motivation, an essential factor in empathy. Lorin Latarro’s choreography cooperates by eschewing extraneous watch-me stunts in favor of group expressiveness. A WWII farewell jitterbug, for instance, is infused with desperation born of the knowledge that this dance may be the boys’ last. The bullying Teddy-boys led by Cousin Kevin (Bobby Conte, sinewy and insidious) establish individual personalities, but also click together like a Swiss watch when Tommy’s pinball expertise is revealed and they become “influencers.” From start to finish, Latarro’s is first-class storytelling-through-dance.
First-class, too, is the ensemble McAnuff has assembled. Conte and the other supporting players make indelible impressions, particularly Adam Jacobs (Broadway’s first Aladdin, now grown to complex manhood) and the laser-focused Alison Luff as the Walkers. As for Ali Louis Bourzgui, who shoulders the role of adult Tommy, I can only say that he commands the stage like… well, like the Sensation the libretto alleges he becomes.
This lucidly-told incarnation, which began its life in 2023 at Chicago’s Goodman Theater, creates an intermission buzz in the house unlike most I’ve encountered in decades of theatergoing – perhaps not since the premiere of Rent, coincidentally also at the Nederlander. Then, as now, a driving rock-based score was performed with panache. (You can’t beat “Pinball Wizard” as a rousing act one closer.)
But there’s something more, something to do with the nexus of the onstage action and the problems to which we’ll return when we exit onto 41st St. again. I believe the audience, like Tommy’s parents in song, “believe their own eyes.” We see in Townshend’s postwar English drifters (as so many did in Jonathan Larson’s Alphabet City vagabonds), flawed, recognizable human beings whose joys and sorrows hit us right where we live. This production creates transcendent enjoyment. Not “I get it, I love it,” but rather: It gets me. It understands me.
The Who’s Tommy opened March 28, 2024, at the Nederlander Theatre. Tickets and information: tommythemusical.com
