'The Who's Tommy'

 The music and dancing in the Broadway revival of The Who’s Tommy at the Nederlander Theatre are fabulous but I left feeling disappointed by the production, which is directed by Des McAnuff.  After an exciting first act the story more or less falls away in the second.  And Ali Louis Bourzgui, in his Broadway debut, doesn’t have the magnetism to carry the act as the adult Tommy, or at least he didn’t when I saw him last night.  I was surprised to read in Playbill that he won a Jeff Award for his performance in the Goodman Theatre pre-Broadway production last summer.

I’ve loved the music since it was released as a rock opera concept album in 1969.  I was in elementary school but I appreciated the electrifying score.  I bought the cassette and wore it out.

Pete Townshend’s music, under the direction of Ron Melrose, is still thrilling.  And choreographer Lorin Latarro’s syncopated dances with the large chorus are exciting as they fill David Korins’s stylized, minimalistic sets.  Amanda Zieve’s broodingly dark lighting interspersed with vibrant colors and Peter Nigrini’s projections all create the perfect atmosphere for the popular rock score.

So much drama is packed, and carried out well, in the first act that there was hardly anywhere left for the book, written by Townshend and McAnuff, to go.

It’s a creepy story, starting in England in 1941 when Mrs. Walker (Alison Luff) get a telegram that her husband, Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs), was killed in the war.  She is pregnant and months later gives birth to Tommy.  I was happy to hear “It’s a Boy” again.  It’s been years since I’ve heard any of this music.

Four years later Tommy (Olive Ross-Kline last night) is at home with his mother and her lover (an unnamed Nathan Lucrezio) when Captain Walker unexpectedly comes home after being released from a P.O.W. camp.  When a fight breaks out between the men, Mrs. Walker turns Tommy away, unaware that he is now looking in the large mirror of the wardrobe.  Captain Walker shoots and kills the lover and Tommy witnesses it all.  Frightened, his parents sing frantically and insistently to him: “You didn’t hear it./You didn’t see it./You won’t say nothing to no one/ever in your life./You never heard it./How absurd it’ll/seem without any proof.”  They conclude with: “Never tell a soul/What you know is the truth.”  From that point on Tommy is emotionally “that deaf, dumb and blind kid” we know so well from “Pinball Wizard.”

Most of this, like all of the story, is told through song and pantomime.  Little dialogue is used.  That’s interesting to watch even if it distances the story.

Walker is cleared after a court rules he acted in self-defense.  The parents spend considerable time taking Tommy to doctors who lift and manipulate his tiny body trying to connect with him, to no avail.  Olive plays unresponsive beautifully, not tensing her body or allowing it to go rag doll limp.  Ten-year-old Tommy (Quinten Kusheba) is also excellent in Tommy’s unresponsiveness as he is sexually molested by Uncle Ernie (John Ambrosino) and bullied and physically abused by Cousin Kevin (Bobby Conte).

But Cousin Kevin ends up giving Tommy a surprising new way to live.  He takes him to an arcade where Tommy outplays everybody through “sense of smell” and “intuition.”  The act ends in a rousing “Pinball Wizard” performed by the Local Lads, Cousin Kevin and the Ensemble.

After all that drama and trauma Act Two dragged for me.  Even Tommy’s awakening seemed anti-climactic.  It was nice to hear “I’m Free” again but, as I mentioned, Bourzgui didn’t give it the electricity it needs.  The show is only two hours and 10 minutes.  Doing it without an intermission would have helped.