There has been talk of touring director Des McAnuff’s extraordinary Goodman Theatre reboot of “Tommy” — The Who’s existential howl of boomer anger from 1969 at the psychological fallout from their emotionally repressed parents. Why fiddle about? Broadway has nothing else like this wizardry going on, not this season and nothing I know to be on the books for next. Straight guys will join the other Broadway constituencies for this, too, and the theater needs all of them together.
This new production of “The Who’s Tommy The Musical” (won’t one word do?) is truly a ready-for-prime-time stunner with enough assets to bring its Chicago audience to its feet well before its end.
The choreography from Lorin Latarro has a Tony Award written all over it; it’s a fabulous movement suite with a confident 1950s strut but also a constant lurching backward that brilliantly explicates and intensifies material about wanting to break free. Better yet, the emotional intensity of the piece is baked into an ensemble that has an innate sense of the kind of stakes necessary to make this work; it’s hard to recall a group of young dancers bringing greater narrative weight in a show, at least since Twyla Tharp. Latarro often fuses her people into a whole — needy, aggressive, cowering, as the moment demands — and then lets them race all over the stage, sometimes like lemmings, sometimes like pilgrims worshipping at the shrine of the deaf, dumb and blind kid. It’s a sight to behold.
So is the combination of David Korins’ expressionistic set design and Peter Nigrini’s projections. None of this technology was available for the original theatrical version of “Tommy” in 1993; here, Korins clearly decided he was tired of more corporatized assignments, always a busy designer’s lot, and to just go for it. He appears to have set about the business of showing the audience the inside of Tommy’s mind, and, boy does he, whether that’s the shattering of a mirror, or the manufacture of an idol, or the unwinding of pain seen and felt by a single boy, representative of all who suffered so deeply from parental silence, it took their own voice.
Korins figured out how to have no cumbersome visual baseline, preferring a kind of non-sentient black from which his staccato, often skeletal images can, and then do, explode like rockets. And they do so on surfaces, and in dimensions, that you don’t know exist. Until they do.
The new “Tommy” is a visually and sonically overwhelming show, but in the positive sense of that word; its spectacle is mitigated by a startlingly accurate sense of its milieu. In the original staging, which I well remember, the images of provincial British life felt less rooted, less actualized and less authentic, even as the show traverses the war years to the 1980s and yet beyond. This time, the requisite stylization still is there but with a far better sense of everyday life.
Had this palette been off, this new take on “Tommy” would have hit the rocks, because the visuals are so dominant. But it all works because it’s all in service of the emotional stakes that Pete Townshend (along with John Entwistle and Keith Moon) built into their prescient masterpiece of a rock opera, a piece that became famous in multiple media because it maintained its cool rocker sheen and remove while also breaking apart the repressive aspects of its era — and telling the British it was OK to put down that anesthetizing pint and feel. To put that another way, “Tommy” was turntable therapy while also offering the afflicted some necessary cover. And the times have changed less than you think.
McAnuff’s work really is something. This new production argues for the wisdom of having original directors redo their work, in this case both co-authorial and directorial, some 30 years later; they know the piece and don’t have to waste time in its comprehension nor in some kind of “response.” This particular director has done all kinds of other work on Broadway, most with equal spectacle but less psychological weight, but it’s pretty obvious that this show remains at the core of what he feels he brings. His new approach is all about feeling, and that of course is the only way through Tommy’s door.
That said, no one wants to see a “Tommy” where actors don’t sing their faces off, and from Ali Louis Bourzgui, who plays the title role with a fascinating quizzical authority, to Christina Sajous, who wails her way through the Acid Queen, they most certainly do. There’s also remarkable work from Adam Jacobs (previously “Aladdin”) as Tommy’s dad. Jacobs, doing something far different from anything I’ve seen him do before, manifests an uptight physical rigidity that is actually very moving, especially at the ending when the theatrical version offers a more explicit intergenerational reconciliation than anyone heard in 1969.
But then the rest of the cast, which includes Alison Luff as Mrs. Walker, John Ambrosino as a tortured Uncle Ernie (Ambrosino has a show all of his own) and Bobby Conte as the kind of Cousin Kevin I knew as a kid (and not to my benefit), is excellent. And the show exits with a great wall of ensemble sound on “Listening to You,” functioning both as a generational catharsis and a reminder of why The Who, and especially Townshend’s music, still can command arenas, even if opera companies weren’t listening to a 20th-century opera hiding in plain sight.
This production feels more finished than any tryout here in recent memory. But if I had to note something to improve, it would be that more work could be done later in Act 2 to better frame the moment, post-Sally Simpson, when Tommy switches tactics and disengages his own centrality; that’s not yet clear here (also true of the 1993 version) and it creates a narrative stutter in what is otherwise a master class in wordless storytelling at a breakneck pace. That’s the section that needs the creatives’ focus.
“Tommy,” Townshend has said, always was intended to be a hopeful work and that’s true, although when you view this show in 2023 rather than 1993, the long-term conduct of the first rock generation and the polarizing legacy they have left us certainly flies into your head.
They (I guess we, given my place on the cusp) didn’t expunge the sins of their parents so much as act them out. But for anyone who likes to use “OK, boomer” as a cheap pejorative, “Tommy” at least is back to explain some of the whys and wherefores.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: Tommy (4 stars)
When: Through Aug. 6
Where: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Tickets: $30-$185 at 312-443-3800 and goodmantheatre.org