POP MUSIC REVIEW They’ve Taken a Generation’s Magic Away By ROBERT HILBURN TIMES POP MUSIC CRITIC

LA JOLLA—There was the sweet feeling of a hit in the air Thursday night following the La Jolla Playhouse production of the Who’s “Tommy.”

The audience attending the world premiere of the first authorized version of the rock opera cheered almost as mightily as the fans must have back in 1969 when the British band first performed its landmark work.

If the first-nighters here had wine glasses, they certainly would have toasted Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle. The three surviving members of the Who watched the performance from seventh-row seats, twisting anxiously like parents at a child's first recital.

In adapting “Tommy,” Tony-winning director Des McAnuff has transferred one of the most challenging and inspiring works in contemporary pop music into a crowd-pleasing and accessible stage production.

It's an undeniably dashing, dazzling, frequently witty, extravagant, grandstanding work.

In the end, however, it is also dishearteningly empty — a sad resting place for the great "Tommy" legacy.

What was once a probing, cutting-edge musical experience has become a mostly conventional "feel good" showcase. There's almost no attempt to come to grips with the emotional or philosophical resonance of the original work.

Thanks to the friskiness of the new production's design, the Who can reasonably look forward to a long theatrical life for "Tommy II," which is what we ought to call the new vehicle since it contains so little of the purity of the original "Tommy."

The downside is that the new version

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DAVID McNEW / Los Angeles Times Michael Cerveris as older Tommy drops in on Nino Pamaran, Marcia Mitzman and Jonathan Dokuchitz in world premiere of the Who's revised rock opera in La Jolla.

STAGE REVIEW The Wizardry of High-Tech Makes It Work By SYLVIE DRAKE TIMES THEATER CRITIC

LA JOLLA—The theater was packed to the proverbial rafters. Outside, a soupy Southern California version of London fog shrouded the city. Inside, the air conditioner broke down. Curtain was delayed by half an hour.

But neither delays nor steamy weather could dampen the sense of Event at Thursday’s opening of the La Jolla Playhouse’s “Tommy,” a new theatrical version of the Who’s 1969 rock opera. And it wasn’t just due to the presence in the audience of the Who’s surviving members or the legion of Who fans (including Liza Minnelli).

The show was the thing.

Revamped by the Who’s Pete Townshend and shaped for the stage by him and Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, this “Tommy” draws its prodigious energy from the original music. But it has been forged into a roiling, high-tech piece of theatrical wizardry for the ‘90s, in which designers John Arnone (sets) and Wendall Harrington (projections) are as much the stars of the production as the music, actors or director.

“'Tommy’s'” book, if one can call it that, is slender, barely linear and has always bordered on the mawkish. That still pertains, virtually intact. It tells the story of an autistic child traumatized into silence when he witnesses his father murder his mother's lover. Despite attempts at treatment, medical and exotic, Tommy's sealed off from the world. He becomes a wiz pinball machine player in his catatonic state and, at age 23, has an epiphany that heals him.

“Tommy” ends with a dubious messianic trip on the wings of his 15 minutes

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