‘The Who’s Tommy’ Broadway Review: Still A Sensation
deadline.comCertainly one definition of great music might include an ability to meet the present – and the future – head-on and come out unbruised, even triumphant.
By that standard and many more, The Who’s Tommy, opening tonight on Broadway, is thrilling proof that the premiere concept album of 1969 is great music indeed.
Gloriously directed by Des McAnuff and updated by him and composer-lyricist Pete Townshend from their own 1993 original Broadway staging, The Who’s Tommy is a non-stop surge of electrified energy, a darting pinball of a production that syncs visual panache with 55-year-old songs that sounds as vital today as they must have at Woodstock.
Themes of enlightenment and connection, trauma and recovery, truth and lies (or alternative truths, in someone’s grotesque parlance) and blinkered hero worship feel more relevant in the 21st Century than Townshend could possibly have imagined way back in the waning days of the ’60s.
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