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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS, Page 69THEATERSee Me, Feel Me
By WILLIAM A. HENRY III
TITLE: THE WHO'S TOMMY
AUTHOR: Music and lyrics by Pete Townshend; book by Pete
Townshend and Des McAnuff
WHERE: La Jolla Playhouse
THE BOTTOM LINE: The grand ole rock opera gets an
electrifying staging aimed at Broadway.
What the Broadway musical most needs, short of stuffing
the entire theatergoing public into a time machine headed
backward, is to make peace with rock music. When the form had
its heyday, its songs were the pop mainstream. Now there is no
pop mainstream -- music, like the radio that delivers it, has
become demographically fragmented -- but rock is the nearest
equivalent. So long as Broadway keeps spurning that propulsive
sound in favor of Tin Pan Alley bygones and pseudo operettas,
it confines its appeal to the elderly of all ages.
Fortunately, no one is more attuned to this than the
syndicate calling itself the Dodgers -- the half-dozen bright
baby-boomer producers who are responsible for Big River, Into
the Woods, The Secret Garden and the hit revival of that epitome
of old Broadway, Guys and Dolls. The canny group and some
partners quietly funneled $500,000 in "enhancement funds" into
a seven-week run at Southern California's nonprofit La Jolla
Playhouse of a new version of Tommy, the original and still
champion rock opera.
The work, created in 1969 by the British rockers the Who,
qualifies as a nostalgia trip for the mid-life-crisis crowd. Its
action stretches back even further -- from 1941, when the title
character's parents meet, to 1963, when he emerges out of a
strange and tormented youth into saintly yet affable manhood.
Nonetheless, the show is strikingly more modern in style,
subject, setting and above all sound than any "new" Broadway
musical since Chess in 1988.
As mounted by La Jolla's artistic director, Des McAnuff,
Tommy is a work in progress. The first act is clear, gripping
and as fast as a rocket. In the second act, the narrative
splinters and slows down. The ideas seem less fresh --
especially a much too long visual riff on links between
demagogic politics and celebrity culture -- and emotional
payoffs are few, though one is a lollapalooza. But the failings
are fixable. The high spots are thrilling. And even for an
antirock curmudgeon like this writer, for whom music ended with
Mahler, the show is never less than fun to hear and, especially,
see.
In essence Tommy is a fairy tale, its outer narrative
based on spells and enchantments, ordeals and rescues, its inner
narrative an evocation of growing up and facing down the
everyday demons of adult life. Unlike the bizarre Ken Russell
film, the narrative reshaped for La Jolla by McAnuff and
composer-lyricist Pete Townshend has an essential innocence,
maybe even an excess of optimism. The title character,
apparently deaf and blind from boyhood, is in fact rendered
autistic by seeing his father shoot his mother's lover -- an
infidelity made less sordid by the fact that the father, a World
War II airman, had been reported dead. Over the years the boy
is sexually molested by an uncle, battered by a cousin, tossed
like a beanbag by insensitive adolescents. He remains serenely
withdrawn. When the spell is broken -- when he re-enters reality
-- he seems unmarked. "I'm free," he sings in the second act's
stunning highlight, as he confronts his tormenters with
confidence, not malice.
Although they will likely be replaced in any move, the La
Jolla players are fine, especially Marcia Mitzman as Tommy's
mother, Cheryl Freeman as a gypsy hooker and Michael Cerveris
as Tommy -- a ghostly image singing in the mirror as a child,
a world-embracing saint as a man, a victim made a poet.