See Me, Feel Me

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: LA JOLLA PLAYHOUSE

THE BOTTOM LINE: The grand ole rock opera gets an electrifying staging aimed at Broadway.

What the Broadway musical most needs, short of stuffing the entire theatergoing public into a time machine headed backward, is to make peace with rock music. When the form had its heyday, its songs were the pop mainstream. Now there is no pop mainstream -- music, like the radio that delivers it, has become demographically fragmented -- but rock is the nearest equivalent. So long as Broadway keeps spurning that propulsive sound in favor of Tin Pan Alley bygones and pseudo operettas, it confines its appeal to the elderly of all ages.

Fortunately, no one is more attuned to this than the syndicate calling itself the Dodgers -- the half-dozen bright baby-boomer producers who are responsible for Big River, Into the Woods, The Secret Garden and the hit revival of that epitome of old Broadway, Guys and Dolls. The canny group and some partners quietly funneled $500,000 in "enhancement funds" into a seven- week run at Southern California's nonprofit La Jolla Playhouse of a new version of Tommy, the original and still champion rock opera.

The work, created in 1969 by the British rockers the Who, qualifies as a nostalgia trip for the mid-life-crisis crowd. Its action stretches back even further -- from 1941, when the title character's parents meet, to 1963, when he emerges out of a strange and tormented youth into saintly yet affable manhood. Nonetheless, the show is strikingly more modern in style, subject, setting and above all sound than any "new" Broadway musical since Chess in 1988.

As mounted by La Jolla's artistic director, Des McAnuff, Tommy is a work in progress. The first act is clear, gripping and as fast as a rocket. In the second act, the narrative splinters and slows down. The ideas seem less fresh -- especially a much too long visual riff on links between demagogic politics and celebrity culture -- and emotional payoffs are few, though one is a lollapalooza. But the failings are fixable. The high spots are thrilling. And even for an antirock curmudgeon like this writer, for whom music ended with Mahler, the show is never less than fun to hear and, especially, see.

In essence Tommy is a fairy tale, its outer narrative based on spells and enchantments, ordeals and rescues, its inner narrative an evocation of growing up and facing down the everyday demons of adult life. Unlike the bizarre Ken Russell film, the narrative reshaped for La Jolla by McAnuff and composer- lyricist Pete Townshend has an essential innocence, maybe even an excess of optimism. The title character, apparently deaf and blind from boyhood, is in fact rendered autistic by seeing his father shoot his mother's lover -- an infidelity made less sordid by the fact that the father, a World War II airman, had been reported dead. Over the years the boy is sexually molested by an uncle, battered by a cousin, tossed like a beanbag by insensitive adolescents. He remains serenely withdrawn. When the spell is broken -- when he re-enters reality -- he seems unmarked. "I'm free," he sings in the second act's stunning highlight, as he confronts his tormenters with confidence, not malice.

Although they will likely be replaced in any move, the La Jolla players are fine, especially Marcia Mitzman as Tommy's mother, Cheryl Freeman as a gypsy hooker and Michael Cerveris as Tommy -- a ghostly image singing in the mirror as a child, a world-embracing saint as a man, a victim made a poet.