Excellent article about The Who:
http://www.thewho.net/articles/rs_encyc.htm
The Who’s Tommy: the original concept album
Released 1969.
Excellent Discography available on The Who’s official website:
http://www.thewho.com/index.php?module=discography&discography_item_id=63&discography_tag=albums
Additional Resources:
1968 Rolling Stone interview w/ Pete Townsend
1970 Rolling Stone article about Meher Baba
1969 Rolling Stone article on the release of the album
Good stuff!: Liner notes from 1995 Tommy reissue
(All information has been reproduced for educational and research purposes only.)
The Who’s Tommy: Seattle Opera Production
Opened: 1970
Seattle Times: (February 2, 1990)
Bette Midler reflecting on her performance as The Acid Queen in 1970 Seattle Opera production of “Tommy”:
“she remembers spending ``some of the 10 worst weeks of my life'' in Seattle in early 1970. She was appearing as the Acid Queen in Seattle Opera's innovative production of The Who's ``Tommy,'' and she vividly remembers the rain, the kids in the chorus fighting with the director, her own unhappy love life and the bad notices she got.
``Coarse and stagey, with unappetizing mammaries,'' she said. ``That's what one of the Seattle newspaper critics called me. I'll never forget that review. It was a nightmare to do that show. Who knew it would be so horrible?”
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19900202&slug=1053918
The Who’s Tommy: Lou Reizner’s All-Star Orchestral Version
Opened: 1972
http://www.artistdirect.com/nad/store/artist/album/0,,176099,00.html
The Who’s Tommy: The Movie
Resources:
Information about 1975 film (with link to watch film online)
U.S. Premier: March 19, 1975; New York, NY
Director: Ken Russel
Tommy: Roger Daltry
Captain Walker: Robert Powell
Mrs. Walker: Ann-Margret
Frank Hobbs: Oliver Reed
Uncle Ernie: Keith Moon
Cousin Kevin: Paul Nicholas
The Acid Queen: Tina Turner
The 1975 film, Tommy, visually and structurally differs from its theatrical counterparts. Structurally, one of the sharpest differences is that Captain Walker--and not Mrs. Walker’s lover-- is murdered. Her lover, Frank Hobbs, seduces Mrs. Walker while young Tommy enjoys Frank’s summer camp, Uncle Frank’s Holiday Camp. After Captain Walker is murdered, Frank assumes the role of young Tommy’s stepfather. His lethargic parenting and seedy dealings lend the film a disturbing undertone. Tommy’s decline seems inevitable under these circumstances and one can’t shake the feeling something terrible is going to happen.
Structurally, Tommy also differs in its tackling of Sally Simpson. In The Who’s Tommy, she plays a relatively pronounced role: staging, lighting, lyrics, and dialogue suggest she’s Tommy’s love interest, on par with Mary Madgalen. Tommy depicts her as a pigtailed child infatuated with a rockstar. Posters of Tommy’s face cover her bedroom wall-to-wall and, when she attends one of his “sermons” (Tommy, backed by a three-piece band, dances on stage and wails into his cross-shaped microphone), their age difference is pronounced. Sally, who can’t be more than twelve or thirteen, looks almost like Tommy’s daughter (Roger Daltry, who plays Tommy, was almost 30 when this scene was shot).
In comparison to its theatrical counterpart, Tommy is visually exaggerated. Tommy’s encounter with the Acid Queen’s drugs is not represented through staging, choreography, or lighting; he is literally encased in an iron maiden of syringes. The maiden then opens three times: first, it reveals Captain Walker as he appeared when he confronted Mrs. Walker and Frank (burns scar half his face); second, it reveals Tommy in a white loin cloth, covered in bloody red roses (the same roses that adorned Captain Walker’s funeral); third, it reveals a skeleton draped in snakes. Obviously, these visuals exceed the boundaries of the film’s theatrical equivalent.
The same goes for Mrs. Walker’s baked beans scene. After Tommy’s pinball stardom repositions Mrs. Walker and Frank in the lap of luxury, we’re greeted with this scene. Mrs. Walker, draped in a shimmering white top and pants, downs champagne while watching Tommy play pinball on T.V. Images of fake commercials for baked beans and chocolate are interspersed between images of Tommy playing pinball. All the while, Mrs. Walker downs champagne to escape her guilt over Tommy’s handicap and the advantage she and Frank took over Tommy’s stardom. Like Tommy’s encounter with the Acid Queen, Mrs. Walker’s scene degenerates into visual spectacle: her monochrome white room becomes drenched in baked beans and chocolate sauce, which erupt from her television after she smashes the screen with her empty champagne bottle.
Reviews:
New York Times:
“‘Tommy" can take being fiddled with, and Mr. Russell's "Tommy" virtually explodes with excitement on the screen. A lot of it is not quite the profound social commentary it pretends to be, but that's beside the point of the fun. "Tommy," which opened yesterday at the Ziegfeld Theater, is mad, funny, irreverent, passionately overproduced, very very loud and full of the kind of magnificent physical energy that usually wrecks a movie by calling attention to performance.”
“The performers are extravagantly fine, particularly Ann-Margret who, as Tommy's mother, ages 20 years in the course of the film (largely through the increased application of blue eye shadow) and sings and dances as if the fate of Western civilization depended upon it. She is tough, vulgar, witty and game. The Who's lead singer, Roger Daltrey, plays the grown-up Tommy with a drive that matches Ann-Margret's while successfully simulating show biz innocence. Oliver Reed is, correctly, almost a cartoon as the opportunistic stepdad. He also sings quite nicely.
The movie, which has the structure of a vaudeville show, is laced together with specialty bits, some of which are simply jokes (Jack Nicholson playing a vacuous Harley Street medical specialist) and some of which are production numbers as riveting as rock can be at its best. These include a sequence in which Tina Turner shows up as The Acid Queen who attempts to cure the catatonic Tommy, and others with Elton John, as the Pinball Wizard defeated by Tommy, and Eric Clapton, as the Preacher who presides over a Lourdes-like shrine devoted to the healing powers of St. Marilyn (Monroe).
As I said, it's all fairly excessive and far from subtle, but in this case good taste would have been wildly inappropriate and a fearful drag.”
Chicago Sun Times:
“Russell correctly doesn't give a damn about the material he started with, greatest art work of the century or not, and he just goes ahead and gives us one glorious excess after another. He is aided by his performers, especially Ann-Margret, who is simply great as Tommy's mother. She has one number that begins in an all-white bedroom with her sexy red dress slit up the side to about the collarbone, and ends with her slithering through several hundred pounds of baked beans. It's that kind of movie.
Tommy's odyssey through life is punctuated by encounters with all sorts of weird folks, of whom the most seductive is Tina Turner as the Acid Queen. The scene begins with Tina as the hooker upstairs from the strip parlor operated by Tommy's wicked stepfather, and ends with a psychedelic stainless steel mummy with acid in its veins. This scene is the occasion for Tommy's first smile, as well it might be.
Then there's the great pinball tournament, which is the movie's best single scene: a pulsating, orgiastic turn-on edited with the precision of a machine gun burst. Elton John, wearing skyscraper shoes, is the defending pinball champion. Tommy is the challenger. Russell cuts between the crowds, the arena, and a dizzying series of close-ups of the games (at times, we almost seem to be inside the pinball machines), and the effect is exhilarating and exhausting.”
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19750101/REVIEWS/501010370/1023
The Who’s Tommy: Broadway Production
Resources:
Basic Broadway Production Info. (at the IBDB)
Scene-by-scene account of Broadway production (incomplete)
Staged at St. James Theatre; New York, NY Preview: March 29, 1993 Total previews: 27 Opened: April 22, 1993
Closed: June 17, 1995 Total Performances: 899
Director: Des McAnuff
Choreographer: Wayne Cliento
Scenic Designer: John Arnone
Costume Designer: David C. Woolard
Lighting Designer: Chris Parry
Projection Designer: Wendall K. Harrington
Sound Design: Steve Canyon Kennedy
Tommy: Michael Cerveris
Captain Walker: Jonathan Dokuchitz
Mrs. Walker: Marcia Mitzman
Uncle Ernie: Paul Kandel
Cousin Kevin: Anthony Barille
The Gypsy/Acid Queen: Cheryl Freeman
Sally Simpson: Sherie Scott
Reviews:
Time Magazine:
“What's onstage ... 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.”
“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.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978407-2,00.html
New York Times: (May 27, 1993) “As might be expected, Broadway's "Tommy" subdues most of the music, trading Roger Daltrey's rock belting for conventional Broadway emoting and taming the Who's glorious power chords with unnecessary keyboard doodling. Songs chug where they should explode, although "I'm Free" does give the show a glimmer of real rock. Meanwhile, some dance numbers would be at home amid the already once-removed 1950's pastiche of "Grease," or in the granddaddy of rock musicals, the rock-hating "Bye Bye Birdie." In one scene, Tommy's cohorts are dressed as Edwardian-style Mods; then they show up as the Mods' sworn enemies, leather-jacketed Rockers.”
“On Broadway, though, inauthenticity goes with the Playbills; no one, after all, expected "Oklahoma!" to offer pure country music or "The King and I" to present Siamese traditions. Broadway also dares not trouble the viewers; "Fiddle About," in which evil Uncle Ernie does nasty things to young Tommy, is a strictly hands-off affair. And the revised opera also inverts the story Townshend originally told, scrambling the Who's "Tommy" so thoroughly that only the sheer momentum of the original tunes (with their rewritten lyrics) can hold the ending together.”
“On Broadway, "Tommy" seeks neither spiritual fulfillment nor political ferment; the revised goal is domestic comfort. The cult-leader references have been excised: no "disciples" in "Pinball Wizard," no "messiahs pointed to the door" in "I'm Free." Nearly every scene has some reminder of homey bliss in it; there's a suspended chair, or the doorway to a house, or a family gathering. The furniture hangs over the show because now, in "I'm Free," Tommy sings a new line that proves the 1990's are the 1960's upside-down: "Freedom lies here in normality." (Normality wasn't a big goal in the 1960's.)”
“Regardless, "Tommy" on Broadway doesn't mean that rock has prevailed on the Great White Way. Its whiz-bang staging may teach other Broadway musicals some new tricks, no matter what
idiom they use for the tunes. But the new "Tommy," like "Guys and Dolls," is a nostalgia trip offering familiar music to an audience that grew up with it: business as usual built on a rock opera that once promised more.”
http://theater.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9F0CE0DB113CF934A15757C0A965958260
New York Times: (May 2, 1993)
“Like no musical I can recall, "Tommy" relies primarily on reverberating music and a barrage of visual imagery to tell its story. The world, held to bare minimum, is the show's least significant aspect.”
“While "Tommy" has a book...it is really more in the nature of an outline. Coherence is not its primary concern. When in a bind, it resorts, likely as not, to fuzzy symbolism in order to resolve complications of the plot. The recurring mirror plainly has something to do with Tommy's isolation, and the mirror smashed figures into his liberation, but, honestly, I can't sort it out much beyond that.”
“Since there is virtually no dialogue...we end up relying heavily on stage images to usher us through the tale. On a bare platform, a musical like "My Fair Lady" would still make sense. "Tommy" wouldn't. It demands illustrating.”
“To note that the scenery is phenomenal is a bit like pointing out that the Grand Canyon is deep. The collaboration of John Arnone (sets), Chris Parry (lights) and Wendall K. Harrington (projections) has resulted in an arresting picture -- hundreds of arresting pictures -- of England from the outset of World War II to the mid-1960's. That the designers have been able to marry the surrealism of Magritte to the cool formalism of Robert Wilson to the explosiveness of Pop Art, without producing a mad hodgepodge, is only part of their triumph. They even transform the auditorium itself into a giant pinball machine in the second act. There's more to it than that, though.
The scenery actually plays an integral role in the narrative, filling in blanks, getting us from point A to point C, telling us what is going on between songs when no one else is.”
“make no mistake: Mr. McAnuff's direction is the real star here. The cast submits to it as it would to the ocean's undertow. There's no possibility for full-blown characterizations under the circumstances; the performers are just another element in the blitz of illustrations. Still, Marcia Mitzman and Jonathan Dokuchitz are plausible as Tommy's distraught parents, and a handsome couple to boot. Anthony Barrile knows Cousin Kevin to be a thug and plays him with proper sullenness, while Paul Kandel's Uncle Ernie, the child molester, oozes grease from his pores and sneaks around on tiptoes.
Uncle Ernie's propensity to "fiddle about" presents a problem, of course, given our heightened sensitivity to child abuse these days. Mr. McAnuff has the reprobate toss Tommy onto a double bed, then sets the bed spinning like a top. The unpleasantness goes no further. Similarly, the Gypsy (Cheryl Freeman) is not allowed to work her wiles on Tommy, as she's done in the past, thereby sparing the boy an acid trip. One more concession, I guess, to the delicacy of our raised consciousnesses.”
Besides the differences in plot (mentioned above in the description of “Tommy” the film), the Broadway production diverges most notably from its film counterpart in visuals. Tommy, in all his ages, wears solid white. This differentiates him from the grays and blues of Mr. and Mrs. Walker and Uncle Ernie, and the blacks of Cousin Kevin and his “biker” gang.
Notable, too, is the production’s use of projections. During Tommy’s rise to fame, a muted gray photo of Tommy blocking the camera with one hand is duplicated across a scrim adorning the backstage. This scrim also displays hundreds of images of World War II and other historical events throughout the play’s timeline in both acts. These projections, as noted in the above reviews, largely supplement the minimalist set and sparse dialogue.”
The Who’s Tommy: Ballet Version
Resources:
Excerpts of Performance available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDuBHJzCLuU
Staged at Victoria Theatre; Dayton, Ohio Premiered: April 26, 2007
Closed: April 29, 2007
Choreographer: Christopher Fleming
The Gypsy/Acid Queen: Katie Keith
This production departs from the “Tommy” film and The Who’s Tommy musical in several ways. Most notably, this production contains no dialogue. This places more emphasis on the visuals--lighting, costumes, and choreography. The absence of dialogue doesn’t rob the production of much, however. The two best known realizations of Tommy’s story--the “Tommy” film and the Broadway musical--relied primarily on visuals and song lyrics. Indeed, the film was entirely devoid of dialogue and the musical only used lines sparingly.
Given Tommy’s historically visual emphasis and the story’s notoriety, visuals and song lyrics are enough to effectively tell the story. Throughout the piece, dance symbolizes experiences and crucial scenes. In “Fiddle About”, for example, Uncle Ernie leaps about the stage in polkadot boxers, clicking his heels and flailing his arms. Tommy’s encounter with the Acid Queen is realized quite ingeniously: the Acid Queen (Katie Keith, draped in a platinum blonde wig and slinky pink lingerie) dances over Tommy, who lies motionless on a bed cushion. Additional female dancers, dressed in similarly vibrant outfits, slide and stretch across Tommy in various ballet extensions. These movements effectively symbolize sex.
