The Who’s Tommy
Nederlander Theater, New York City ★★★★
“A big blast of Boomer pleasure has arrived on Broadway,” said Charles Isherwood in The Wall Street Journal. Following an acclaimed run in Chicago last summer, The Who’s Tommy has delivered “a seismic jolt” to a season in New York that’s been short on musical magic. Des McAnuff, who co-wrote the book with the Who’s
Pete Townshend, once again directs the stage adaptation of the band’s 1969 rock opera, and his “thoroughly intoxicating” revival benefits from cutting-edge digital projection technology. “Watching the new Who’s Tommy feels like being immersed in a contemporary video game.” This revival, even compared with past Tommys, “has a casual relationship with coherence,” said Elisabeth Vincentelli in
The Washington Post. As always, 4-year-old Tommy is shocked “deaf, dumb, and blind,” per the lyrics, when he witnesses his father commit a murder in 1945 London. Young Tommy suffers several more traumas before growing up to be a pinball god played by Ali Louis Bourzgui, a “slightly aloof” heartthrob. But because the time frame has been blurred and the historical allusions scrambled, this staging is laden with “headspinning whaaaaa?’ moments.”
“That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem,” said Jesse Green in The New York Times. It’s always been wisest to understand Tommy as “a dream you are watching from a perch inside someone’s amygdala.” But the Tommy created by Townshend could be understood as a damaged, complex, yearning character. Here, that character gets lost, and “unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses.”