Peter Townshend called the CNE Coliseum a "garbage can" last night, and he was, of course, perfectly accurate, but the place's gruesome acoustics and depressing atmosphere didn’t keep Townshend and the other members of the superbly adventurous English band The Who from offering a version of their 50 minute rock opera, Tommy, that was powerful, inventive, contemporary and utterly beautiful.

Tommy, briefly, recounts the story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy who is saved by a pinball machine. Before his salvation, he endures unspeakable horrors, including sexual molestation and a disastrous acid trip. His emergence as a pinball wizard rescues him from a world of no human contact, but he promptly blows his new state by subjecting his friends to something close to the fate he suffered. They turn on him and, at the end of the opera, Tommy is reduced to his former ugly, helpless condition.

Very little of this story line was audible last night. The homely structure of the Coliseum and the inadequacies of the sound system combined to blur and distort most of Tommy’s libretto. And the audience had to content itself with the music and theatre of the Who. Fortunately, both were magnificent.

Tommy’s score is clean and severe. It’s hard rock edited to its final basics, and among the four members of the Who, Townshend on guitar and Keith Moon on drums have completely mastered the genre.

Townshend, a supremely physical player, full of electric leaps and scissor kicks, plays in a style that is nothing less than controlled chaos. He threatens at any moment to shatter your mind with his breaks and solos. He leaps to the very borders of sanity. He never crosses the line. His playing is deliciously swift, hard and rocketing, filled with the technique and style of a man who knows precisely what effect he is reaching for.

Moon accepts an enormous load in Tommy and carries it. The opera has few soft moments, many driving, heavy passages, and Moon sustains them all. He drops bombs, thunders like the gods of heaven, roars, beats and hammers and spills machine-gun fire all over the stage. And it all works. Moon, like Townshend, plays with total empathy for the moods and emotions of Tommy. It’s only a secondary point that he may be the one truly great drummers rock has produced — it seemed more important last night that he was the perfect drummer for Tommy.

Tommy is clearly one of the few large classics of rock, and Toronto was blessed when the Who brought it to the city. But why was it presented in the Coliseum? Why did the promoters insult The Who, the music, not to mention the audience, with such a preposterous choice of locations?

☆ Jack Batten writes on pop music and jazz for The Star.