Rocket From A Bygone Era

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: THE WHO'S TOMMY

AUTHOR: MUSIC AND LYRICS BY PETE TOWNSHEND; BOOK BY PETE TOWNSHEND AND DES MCANUFF

WHERE: BROADWAY

THE BOTTOM LINE: Better decades late than never, the original rock opera is still champion in a wizard Broadway staging.

If it had reached Broadway when it appeared as a concept album and gave birth to the rock opera in 1969, or even when it was filmed as a surreal fantasia by Ken Russell in 1975, Tommy might have had epic impact on the history of the musical. Rock is the mainstream sound of our era, and the theater is long overdue in making peace with that. Instead, a gloriously hyperkinetic staging arrives, a quarter century late, as nostalgia.

The world Tommy portrays is bygone. People don't drop acid much anymore; electronic-video gamesters have crowded out pinball wizards; a baby conceived, like the title character, at the start of World War II is officially a pre- boomer and apt to be a grandparent today. So despite its billing as "new," Tommy becomes that oddest of entities, a period rock musical -- playing to a nonperiod audience. Unimaginably to kids who boogied in the aisles at concert versions way back when, the Broadway crowd cheers while sitting sedately, and there isn't a whiff of controlled substances in the house.

What's onstage, however, is anything but stuffy. In a tryout last July at California's La Jolla Playhouse, the first act moved like a rocket, while the second act sputtered. So composer-lyricist Pete Townshend and director Des McAnuff rewrote the libretto again, added new music and clarified -- purists would say changed -- the underlying message. Now the whole production hurtles forward with visual excitement and emotional clout worthy of the score.

Tommy is a fairy tale with heavy Freudian overtones. The narrative centers on spells and enchantments, ordeals and rescues, in a life verging on the gothic. The thematic concerns are more universal: growing up, facing down everyday demons, coming to terms with the past. In the current plot (there have been several variations over the years), the central character is a boy of four when his long-missing father returns home from a German POW camp. The father, presumed dead, finds his wife in the embrace of another man, quarrels with him and shoots him. The frantic parents instruct their son never to speak of this event to anyone.

From that moment, the traumatized boy acts deaf, dumb and blind; he responds only, and secretly, to the sight of himself in the mirror. Over the years he is molested by an uncle, tormented by a cousin, tossed like a beanbag by insensitive adolescents. At last a domestic upset ends with the mirror shattered, setting Tommy free of his autistic isolation. He flees home, becomes a tabloid curiosity and show-biz superstar. Then he returns to his family to celebrate normal life. Rather than a mystical icon of spiritual regeneration through transcendence, as he seemed at a less materialistic moment in popular culture, he now stands for rehabilitation and forgiveness, almost as if enrolled in some 12-step recovery program. Michael Cerveris, saintly and poetic as Tommy in La Jolla, now seethes with energy. Of a solid supporting cast, the most remarkable is Buddy Smith as Tommy at age 10, his body endlessly pliable, his unresponding features hauntingly tinged with fear.

If the narrative turns its back on glitter, the production doesn't. Tommy uses film projections more than solid set pieces to keep the action moving. The back wall is a ceaselessly shifting kaleidoscope of images, sometimes placing the moment in a specific physical environment, sometimes commenting on it with psychologically suggestive imagery, always dazzling the eye without befuddling the mind.