‘The Who’s Tommy’ a Wonderful Noise

Rock opera is loud but it sounds great and looks good, too

By Lawrence Devine

Free Press Theater Critic

Think of a 7-foot, 400-pound jockey. Making it bigger does not automatically make it better. But it sure might be lively to watch, just like the gargantuan “opera” they’ve made out of Pete Townshend and the Who’s noisy little 1969 album, “Tommy.”

A major sound and light show, “The Who’s Tommy” is splattered all over the stage of the Masonic Temple Theatre where the Metropolitan Opera played in days of yore. The handsome Masonic is appropriately huge enough for the new “Tommy’s” flaming pinball machines, rockets, British paratroopers and the sonic shock waves out of the orchestra pit.

All comes to those who wait — if they have been waiting 25 years to see the superstar band of the ’60s “British invasion” swell up and go Broadway. Like all the so-called pop “operas,” “Tommy” is less than it might be because it has no dialogue. It’s not just “Tommy,” but a routine omission these days, which always makes one suspect the authors were not gifted enough to write any dialogue.

But for those who do not care about old-hat items like character, subtlety or vocal clarity, “Tommy” onstage is rockdom’s own electric wonderland. Pumped up to fabulistic dimensions is the album originally scored for the lads’ one guitar, bass, drums and beautiful Roger Daltry’s vocals.

Metal 40-foot girders of lights tower beside and in back of the story of the British boy who is traumatized at age 4 and then finds his niche as an amusement arcade phenomenon. Technically, “Tommy” is gorgeous. Giant slides on the backdrop flash entire neighborhoods of apartment blocks, World War II bombers soar across the scrim, and television monitors light up in video arcs across the proscenium.

And the band plays on, pumping out fusillades of synthesizers, guitars, percussion and the deep halloo of a French horn. The meat of “Tommy” is simply an audience’s getting a lot of bang for the buck. The music as ever is stirring, in the gut-felt way that roller coasters are stirring. I find it, however, all of the moment. Newcomers to “Tommy,” who did not grow up memorizing the bravado of then-24-year-old composer-lyricist Pete Townshend, may find its songs the Chinese food of most pop operas.

The production, no argument, is staged with amazing imagination and verve by Des McAnuff. McAnuff took an album and made a stage behemoth out of it, just as Hal Prince did with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s robotic “Evita.” The large cast of 30, led by Steve Isaacs as the adult Tommy, hurtles dramatically through the welter of neon and all-around fortissimo. The choreography, by Wayne Cilento, is perhaps the best part of the show. The dances are sometimes surreal, like the story. You recognize the 1940s jitterbuggers, for instance, but they’re doing it herky-jerky to a rock rhythm, like Glenn Miller on bennies.

The costumes are cunning, as loud visually as the amplifiers are aurally. Tommy is dressed all in white, the symbol of light amid post-war Britain. Around him is a pinball-machine color scheme: surgeons in cherry red operating gowns, nurses in bright mustard smocks, groupies in red and yellow (and ’60s blonde Sassoon flips) and thuggy security guards in Mussolini gray.

Textually, “Tommy” at this late date comes on like an early Andrew Lloyd Webber Jesus parable. Interpret the lyrics right and you get electric hero as rock star as messiah.

To the hubbub and thrashing of Townshend’s pumped-up musical scenario, the exotic, only child finds his voice, becomes the hero of the masses, is villified . . . and finally sings out “I climb the mountain . . . I see the millions . . . I see the glory.”

Only now, the millions see “Tommy.” Little Tommy, playing deaf, dumb and blind after seeing his father shoot down his mother’s lover, finds stardom through electricity — the pinball machine. The adoring publics chant the famous lyric: “he sure plays a mean pinball.” Translate pinball as guitar, and there you are.

And there “Tommy” is at the Masonic Temple. It is full of sound and furious energy. What it signifies depends on old memories of Townshend, Daltry, John Entwistle and Keith Moon. But, after opening night was canceled due to subarctic temperatures, there is this furnace to raise Who lovers’ body heat.

REVIEW

ON STAGE: “The Who’s Tommy,” a musical drama with music and lyrics by Pete Townshend and book by Townshend and Des McAnuff, will play through Feb. 6 at Masonic Temple Theatre, 500 Temple. Performances: Tue.-Fri. at 8 p.m., Sat. at 2 & 8 p.m., Sun. at 2 & 7:30 p.m. Performance lasts: 2 hrs, 10 mins. Tickets: $25-$47.50. Call 832-2232 anytime.

Steve Isaacs, center in white shirt, plays the adult Tommy and is one of the 30 cast members who help make “The Who’s Tommy” an enjoyable experience. The show is playing at the Masonic Temple Theatre.