‘The Who’s Tommy’ Broadway Review: Still A Sensation
29.03.2024 - 02:15
/ deadline.com
Certainly one definition of great music might include an ability to meet the present – and the future – head-on and come out unbruised, even triumphant. By that standard and many more, The Who’s Tommy, opening tonight on Broadway, is thrilling proof that the premiere concept album of 1969 is great music indeed.
Gloriously directed by Des McAnuff and updated by him and composer-lyricist Pete Townshend from their own 1993 original Broadway staging, The Who’s Tommy is a non-stop surge of electrified energy, a darting pinball of a production that syncs visual panache with 55-year-old songs that sounds as vital today as they must have at Woodstock. Themes of enlightenment and connection, trauma and recovery, truth and lies (or alternative truths, in someone’s grotesque parlance) and blinkered hero worship feel more relevant in the 21st Century than Townshend could possibly have imagined way back in the waning days of the ’60s.
With a superb cast headed by Broadway newcomer Ali Louis Bourzgui as Tommy, the “deaf, dumb and blind kid” – most of whatever language less-than-acceptable by today’s standards has been retained – and Alison Luff as his mom Mrs. Walker, Tommy feels less like a stick-to-what-works revival than a top-to-bottom reimagining. Nearly all of it works beautifully.
Neither the music – from “I’m Free,” “See Me, Feel Me,” “Sensation” and “Pinball Wizard” to “Acid Queen,” “Christmas” and “Tommy, Can You Hear Me?” – nor the plot has changed much in the last 55 years since the former first grabbed FM radio listeners and the latter baffled stoned hippies hoping to make sense of it (the album didn’t come with instructions).
So, the plot: In a brief preamble set in 1941, British officer Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs)
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