The design team for The Who’s Tommy—the rock-and-roll musical that originated at California’s La Jolla Playhouse, is currently running on Broadway and this month begins a multi-city national tour—was called upon to play a role that theatre designers rarely undertake: that of storyteller. In other words, the show’s creators weren’t simply requiring the design artists to create ambiance, a sense of period, locale, class, character and all of the conventional duties usually given to designers—we were asking them to literally help us develop the fundamental narrative throughline. This assignment was made all the more daunting by the fact that we had two departments that don’t normally exist, even on large musicals—projections and video.
There were a number of reasons that it became important to embrace the idea of visual storytelling. The Who’s Tommy was based on the 1969 song-cycle recording, and while we were very fortunate in having the involvement of its principal creator, the legendary English guitarist and songwriter Pete Townshend, there were substantial gaps in the story line that needed to be addressed in order to realize a full theatrical presentation of the piece. The delicacy of the original story—about a traumatized youngster who rises to pop stardom as a deaf, dumb and blind pinball virtuoso—was one of the concept album’s great strengths. It inspired a willing audience to fill in its own personal detail, and the ambiguities and puzzles that the album served up were consistent with Pete’s ambitions to create a spiritual journey. We wanted very badly to preserve the strength of the original recording. At the same time, in order to produce a viable theatre piece, we needed to flesh out and expand the original.
From the beginning, Pete and I decided not to add a lot of dialogue and only call on new music or lyric changes when we found them absolutely necessary. We made a decision to employ stagecraft and what turned out to be a number of different theatrical storytelling techniques to allow the libretto to do what it had done on the initial recording: advance the piece thematically without expecting it to develop the story in the manner a conventional musical might. It was our belief that this was crucial if we were going to retain the purity of the original libretto, which had its own unique poetry. Despite the considerably detailed story we expected to tell, we didn’t want to clutter Tommy up with added recitative.
Furthermore, we were not interested in exploring Tommy as a fantasy. We believed that the “Amazing Journey” described in the lyric was best achieved by grounding the members of Tommy’s family, the Walkers, on some kind of recognizable landscape. As Tommy sings in “I’m Free,” “freedom tastes of reality.” Ken Russell, the British filmmaker, had in his 1974 motion picture already given us the fantasy extravaganza (which lives on as a prime example of that particular genre of filmmaking from the ’70s) and we were more interested in exploring Tommy as a dramatic theatre piece.
Choreographer Wayne Cilento and I knew we would be able to flesh out the story with our staging, but we recognized that we would be dependent on the work of the designers to give us genuine completion. Pete and I agreed that what we were dealing with what was, in essence, a postwar story set against the background of historical events that led up to the 1960s, so the blitzkrieg of 1940 and the rock-and-roll British invasion of 1963 became the bookends for our timeline.
Our interest in Tommy, the play, as opposed to Tommy, the spectacle, necessitated the development of throughline characters. This was a departure from earlier unofficial versions (stagings without Pete’s involvement, ranging from a rendering by the Royal Canadian Ballet to a short-lived West End extravaganza to scores of college and amateur versions), which tended to see characters like Cousin Kevin and Uncle Ernie as cameos for celebrity performances. We set out to weave those key roles and other new characters, such as the Minister and his wife, throughout the piece to strengthen the spine of our story. Most of Tommy occurs while our hero has descended into a severely traumatized state. He is, in fact, struggling to break through the surface of reality. We called on the design team to structure this dominant section of the piece leading up to “I’m Free” as a series of alternating attempted cures and abuses. As with most stories from dramatic literature, this required us to develop and explore Tommy’s family.
Considering his total isolation in most of the story, how were we to find an emotional throughline for the character of Tommy? The basic conflict in the story, we agreed, was between Tommy and Tommy. This gave birth to the idea of the multiple Tommys (i.e., Tommy at 4, Tommy at 10 and the adult Tommy—our narrator). It was the interaction between these characters that created the magical layer which led to many of the most exotic visual elements in the production. We tried to capture theatrically the spiritual journey, an idea that was the essence of Pete’s original concept—a musical dream. Still, this version of the story has its feet planted firmly on the ground, in the time period of 1940-1963, where we found some of our richest material. We recognized in our excavation of the rock opera that the story was at least to some extent autobiographical—not that Pete was personally traumatized to the point of becoming deaf, dumb and blind, but rather that he was writing an autobiography, perhaps unconsciously, for a generation. Tommy’s physical and metaphysical journey is largely a metaphor, and this, we came to understand, helps explain the Tommy phenomenon—the fact that the character became an icon, even a mascot, for a whole generation. It may explain why he lives on with such vitality today.
Tommy is a vessel into which we can pour our own spirits. As we grow older, he serves as a surrogate for the spirits of our children. Because of the power of the basic idea of a child disappearing into himself, this pure and simple contemporary parable was able to touch upon a whole host of issues, from child abuse to drug addiction and prostitution. Pete even managed to explore surprising and insightful ideas like the relationship in England between World War II and rock-and-roll. While he was in his early twenties, Pete was struggling as all artists do to understand his life and times; we came to the struggle with the great advantage of 20 years hindsight. By placing our Tommy clearly in postwar West London, we were able to explore the story’s depths with some perspective. The research, knowledge and sheer imagination of our design team gave us a firm foundation on which to work.
Scenic Design
John Arnone and I have been working together for almost 10 years, collaborating on nine productions. To my astonishment, he was willing to start work on designing Tommy before we had as much as a script. Pete and I had cooked up our second version of an outline, with a new song order, and of course we did have the original libretto, but there were moments during my first meeting with John where I felt as if I were partaking in some ancient tribal storytelling ritual. In retrospect, I think this turned out to be a tremendous advantage. John had spent a good deal of time listening to the original album (which eventually became the bible for everyone on this project). Pete and I had assembled the structure for the piece with a fair bit of detail. For example, for the “Christmas” scene we knew that we needed three locations—the church, outside the church and the home of Cousin Kevin’s parents (the relatives) and their Dickensian Christmas table. We had broken down and reassembled the libretto and music with allowances for transitions, but the ideas were by no means fossilized, so there was plenty of room for John to get inside the story.
Pete and I had envisioned projections from the beginning of the process because we knew we would be dependent on a kind of cinematic velocity to move our story forward. Frankly, I had given up on this idea because of budgetary constraints before my first meeting with John. Projections simply seemed out of reach. To my great relief, the La Jolla Playhouse production manager Don Gilmore, and then technical director, Mark Maltby, realized their importance and wouldn’t let me give up on them. So when Arnone arrived at our first real meeting with the design for the basic skeletal unit set, it included nine rear-projection screens. John had managed to thread the needle with an initial basic look for the set, thereby defining Tommy‘s visual universe. Our next job was to delineate the Walkers’ house, 22 Heathfield Gardens, named after a combination of elements from Pete’s past. This would be ground zero for our story—our house—our Elsinore. We would we return to this primary location at moments throughout the journey, and we were going to have to endow this simple middle-class rowhouse with considerable mystique.
When Pete, John and I invented the house, we knew that we were developing our basic vocabulary: Tommy, in his traumatized state, would naturally dream about the objects he saw during the murder. This gave us our fundamental chain of images—an armoire with the mirrored surface (a two-way mirror which in a very simple fashion allowed us to create some of the most important moments), doors, windows, a bed and a couch with a lamp. We finally decided after much agonizing to render them all as white objects in order to recycle them liberally as part of the ongoing black-and-white motif. To capture Tommy’s point of view we attempted to display naturalistic elements behaving in unnatural ways. We thereby managed to avoid the drug-induced paraphernalia of psychedelia that one might expect with a late-’60s piece. We chose Tommy’s moment of trauma to set up the basic idea that he would perceive mundane objects behaving in extraordinary ways (or one might better say, misbehaving). Tommy would take on a new sense of geometric dimension. The magic in the stagehouse came from chairs flying 15 feet off the ground and objects spinning out of control. (The spinning bed in “Fiddle About” was initially conceived as a way of evoking the horror of Tommy’s abuse at the hands of Uncle Ernie.) Spinning became one of our visual image chains, and an essential part of Wayne Cilento’s choreographic vocabulary, which he elaborated on with great aplomb in the show’s dance and movement.
Computers were, of course, crucial to achieving the kind of advanced stagecraft demanded by these ideas. At one point on Broadway we had 35 separate hard drives operating in rehearsal, enabling us to gain a kind of complexity and control unthinkable when the album first came out. It’s worth pointing out that Tommy was also an excuse to develop new physical hardware for the stage. John and I knew that we wanted to bring the floating doors at 22 Heathfield Gardens on stage spinning. Don Gilmore and Mark Maltby of the La Jolla Playhouse helped John create a small tracking revolve that was embedded under the stage deck so that these doors, could magically float on doing pirouettes.
We had given ourselves license to create the show’s transitions surrealistically, and we recognized that one of the greatest challenges we faced had to do with the sheer number of them. In a traditional Broadway musical there might be 15 locations, rarely more and often fewer. In Tommy we were planning to create seven separate locations in the “Overture” alone. Naturally we were concerned about scenic movement and flow, and we were also trepidatious about the danger of monotony. Scenery was conceived to track on not only from wing-to-wing but up-stage and downstage, and from above and below, like a magic box.
From the very beginning, we wanted to create magical entrances for Tommy, the narrator (played by Michael Cerveris), who serves as a kind of spiritual guide for young Tommy during Act 1. We needed to communicate his unworldliness and endow him with wizardry. The traditional way to achieve this, going back to the time of the Greeks, is through flying, so we called in the Flying Foys, specialists in aerial staging. Michael’s two initial entrances are on wires. First he catapults up on top of the armoire and stands above young Tommy, who faces the mirror. This sets up the mirror as a magical device. On the second entrance he tumbles in from high in the wings. Wayne Cilento had once, as a dancer, tumbled in from above doing aerial somersaults, and the Foys were quick to embrace that idea for Tommy. This entrance literally sets up the “Amazing Journey.” Later in the act he appears in a white shaft of light, through the mirrored surface and 20 feet above the stage on the truss work—all simple entrances, but appropriate ones for a magical figure. There is the illusion that Tommy spends more time flying than he actually does.
It’s important to note that John and I found some of the most complicated sequences easily and quickly. For example, the multiple events in the “Overture” had been worked out quite early on. While Pete and I were asking for a lot in a six-minute stretch, John came up with the solutions almost effortlessly.
We found our greatest challenge to be something that may seem relatively simple. Pete and I had decided to leave Tommy a local hero for as long as possible in keeping with our intention of grounding the piece. It was therefore necessary to accelerate his rise to fame after his awakening from the trauma—in a sense, we had to transform him from the hero of the local pub to an international celebrity in about three minutes of stage time.
It is far more dramatically viable to portray the relationship between Tommy and Uncle Ernie than it is to portray the relationship between Tommy and thousands of fans. (Of course, the best way to portray the fans was through the single face and voice of Sally Simpson, which Pete had given us in the original.) I had also been allergic to the idea of Tommy playing pinball in public. Somehow I could not wrap my mind around an image that seemed so ludicrously farfetched. It wasn’t until seeing the La Jolla production that I realized what Pete had created in pinball was a brilliant metaphor for rock-and-roll. It was clear that the audience would not only accept that idea but, if we handled it properly, embrace it. The autobiographical level of the piece became complete when we realized that Tommy needed to smash his pinball machine as Pete Townshend had once smashed his Stratocaster.
One of Who member Roger Daltrey’s questions after he saw the La Jolla production was, “Where is the pinball in the second act?” We had not wanted to portray Tommy as a guru, and by taking pinball away from him we had done precisely what we were desperately trying to avoid. The audience was more than willing to accept Tommy as a kind of pop star/pinball wizard/spiritual leader, all embodied in one performer. We just had to find a way to represent that essence for them. We had made use of very few reprises in La Jolla, and it became clear that the character of Tommy needed to claim his own image by reprising “Pinball Wizard.” The potential for expressing rage and energy by bringing back this song was very exciting to all of us.
John, a gracious Texan always receptive to late-arriving ideas, inherited the difficult task of helping me assemble a sequence that would make sense of all of this. Right away, we came up with the turreting WWII-style pinball machine that Tommy uses to zap his family after his awakening, and the exploding, mirrored pinball machine. There was a moment when Tommy was to leave the mirrored machine and climb the podium to face the stadium lights of the cheering crowd, and we couldn’t figure out for the longest time how to incorporate pinball into this crucial sequence. After weeks of talking it through, the idea of a third pinball machine, an icon floating above the podium, finally occurred to John, and the sequence was complete. That little pinball machine seemed to be John’s biggest migraine through the whole process, and yet now it seems like such a stroke. It’s that kind of simple little stroke that can stop a whole tidal wave of questions from descending on a director, and I am greatly in his debt. Pinball had been introduced in the first act with an unelaborate machine at the Youth Club, and developed through the spectacular light-box machines of “Pinball Wizard,” through to the exploding mirrored machine of Act 2. An effective way to close the image chain was with this sleek, symbolic abstraction.
Projections
We started story-boarding the projections with Vince Mountain, a young scenic designer who is a graduate of the masters’ program at the University of California San Diego. John and I recognized that the production would live or die based on our ability to conceive, design and execute the artwork for the slides. The projections were clearly going to be the dominant visual element in the piece, creating an extraordinary, ever-changing cyclorama. John suggested at this point that we would be wise to bring in a projections specialist and recommended our mutual friend, Wendall Harrington.
Wendall had worked at La Jolla Playhouse on James Lapine’s brilliant 1985 production of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s Merrily We Roll Along. After getting Wendall’s advice and approval on the nine rear projection fields and the other basic elements in the projection package, we set about walking her through the storyboard that John had drawn up with Vince. Wendall was particularly helpful in getting us to think in terms of animation and opened up our imaginations to new ways of achieving transitions.
The minimum number of projectors per field in order to achieve the ability to animate is three. In La Jolla, we could only afford to achieve this ratio on three of the nine projection fields, but we could see the potential for great results. Later when it came time to do Tommy at the St. James Theatre on Broadway, Wendall was key in helping us lick the limitations of the lack of stage depth (28 feet) by going to 56 projectors on 18 projection fields, echoing John’s windowpane pattern from Heathfield, which occurs throughout the play.
After we brought Wendall aboard, she set about developing her own storyboard based on John’s initial sketches, and gradually the art became more and more specific. Projections supported our storytelling on a couple of different levels. They provided us with the ability to create a constantly changing background of different locales, interiors, exteriors and more abstract and surreal landscapes. They also gave us the ability to illustrate our vision of Tommy’s traumatized point of view—that’s where the work got wild and hallucinogenic. We explored spatial relationships that illustrated the distorted perceptive mechanism of a traumatized child. As we approached the point of producing actual art, Wendall’s collaborator, Bo Eriksson, became an important player. Like John, Wendall and Bo had both spent a great deal of time with the music, and, with the programmers Leo Benevides for La Jolla and Paul Virshbow for New York, they managed to visually capture and celebrate the musical pulse of the show.
One of the discoveries I’ve made about projected images is that eventually you reach a point of visual saturation. The only way to get beyond this—to top it, if you like—is to take them away. In Act 1 this concept led me and Arnone to the ultra-violet cyclorama and flaming oil drums (nothing like real fire as a light source) for “Acid Queen.” All that remains of the projections is the single image of green lips floating on a suspended window above.
Costumes
Since we were covering two decades of 20th-century history, we needed costumer David Woolard’s help with the timeline. We were also depending on his wild imagination to transform a company of about 20 actors into more than 100 characters.
David began by grabbing onto the plan for the black-and-white overture sequence, and went on to explore and develop concepts for the uses of color. He suggested that we pepper the black-and-white imagery across the entire piece to echo the WWII theme and keep its meaning alive. This was in keeping with Pete’s interest in connecting the creation of rock-and-roll to the sons and daughters of the generation who had fought in the war. Personally, it brought to mind a comment Joseph Papp had made to me: “I’m a victim of WWII, you’re a victim of rock-and-roll.”
David also pointed out that a number of characters would be formally uniformed in various ways—soldiers, doctors, security guards, nurses, an Episcopalian Choir, the less obvious “uniforms” of Mods for the early ’60s and, at David’s suggestion, Teddy Boys for the late ’50s “Pinball Wizard.” Through the use of unnaturally strong colors in these various uniforms (the Bobbies, for example, are in electric blue), David created a distorted, nightmarish world that gave us another glimpse into the mechanics of Tommy’s mind.
We had always planned to use strong and vibrant colors for the trauma sequence, but David suggested that we add another stage of pastels and subdued tones for the period between the war and the murder of the lover. This gave us a kind of ground zero for Tommy’s early years and was far smarter than banging from black and white to peacock and magenta. David contrasted these strong color choices by keeping the three Tommys exclusively in white, the only exception being a trauma-yellow leather jacket for the “Pinball Reprise.” David employed classical costume traditions by color-coding characters—Tommy in white, Kevin accented in red, and so on, giving us the heightened and somewhat formal look you might find in a period play of another century. This helped us focus the story, but it also allowed us to keep the mythic side of Tommy alive.
My favorite part of David’s design takes our chorus of louts through the fashions of the ’50s and ’60s, strengthening our sense of time passing and giving us a wonderfully peculiar and idiosyncratic gang of foppish, leather-clad yabbos.
David also introduced an invaluable idea to the overall look of the show—he understood that we were dead set against the notion of a “’60s” look for Tommy, but suggested that we explore the work of pop artists of the period simply as an influence. This proved to be a bit of a breakthrough. The work his suggestion inspired us to do evoked the work of the art schools of London where Pete and many of his contemporaries had studied.
Video
We decided to introduce video into the production for the last 20-minute stretch of Act 2 only. The idea was to replace the projections with a new visual device that would outline the stage with a fresh style of imagery, and give the act the same kind of lift we had created in Act 1. We employed a horizontal line of monitors on Arnone’s truss, which could be lowered to the deck. In La Jolla, our resident design assistant Tom Mays did research and assembled stock footage. For the video imagery we went back to black and white. This enabled us to use period film from the early ’60s, once again helping to clarify our timeline. More significantly, the black-and-white video and the black-box void of the set for the final sequences quoted the WWII section from the start of the play.
But the most important job we asked of the video was to lend credibility to Tommy’s rapid rise to stardom. Tommy’s face on a dozen TV monitors in the midst of recognizable ’60s footage is absolute testimony to public attention three book scenes might not be able to provide as much. But with clever video imagery, Tommy’s face can compete in our minds with Lee Harvey Oswald, Liz and Dick, and the Beach Boys of 1963.
We were all pleased with the video at La Jolla, but felt the need to go further in New York. We brought in the team of Linda Batwin and Robin Sylvestry, and they helped us take the video to a new technical and creative level.
Arnone designed banks of monitors at each side of the proscenium arch, truly framing the space. Three additional floating monitors over the stage kicked off the video sequence. By using two Delcom video wall processors, Linda and Robin were able to matrix images over these new monitor fields, giving us much more variety and flexibility. We were also able to tape more original sequences, which we combined with the stock footage. This helped us tremendously in “Holiday Camp,” performed by Uncle Ernie on top of a bank of monitors displaying an endless queue of ticket buyers. The video provided merchandise on the monitors for Ernie to peddle, clarifying his action and freeing actor Paul Kandel to concentrate on manipulating the crowd.
The items we chose to display came from earlier icons in the play that had been established as having a certain purity—the white chair, the balloon, the mirror. By bringing them back as Ernie’s paraphernalia we were able to desecrate them, a simple and direct way of presenting the corruption of Tommy and the new world around him.
In addition to original and stock footage, Linda and Robin gave us wireless live video cameras to be used in performance. For the finale they are disguised in period 16mm camera housings so that we watch “Sally Simpson’s Question” and the climactic “We’re Not Going to Take It” live on television, simultaneously giving the last scene optimum power by helping the staging and choreography achieve the sense of a media event.
The most important choice made concerning the video was to resist using it at all earlier in the piece. Its mere presence in the post-“Miracle Cure” stretch makes an invaluable statement about the figure Tommy becomes.
Lighting
Tommy turned out to be an extremely difficult show to light, partially due to the sheer velocity of the pacing, partially because of the projections. Front light would of course wash out the projected images so the designers were more or less limited to top and side light. We required the lighting to create a seamless flow from scene to scene and look to look. The designers—Frances Aronson in La Jolla and Chris Parry in New York—were also required to focus the audience’s attention on our story points, and prioritize visual events. In a sense the lighting designer became the visual editor of Tommy.
On Broadway, Chris Parry employed six follow spots and a whole host of robotic Vari-lites to aid him in this task. This gave him the ability to discriminate between primary, secondary and tertiary characters in any given scene. He had the advantage of being able to study the art for Wendall’s projections, much of which had evolved in La Jolla, and he was able to pull color out from the projections onto the stage to accompany the constantly changing backgrounds.
Chris created a series of light motifs for the various episodes of the house—alcoholic acid green for Ernie, red for Cousin Kevin—to go with the accents in the costumes, and a color we refer to as trauma yellow, which grows out of the flower Tommy gives his mother just before the murder of the lover. The organization of these colors and their recurrence throughout the piece gave us a valuable device to help paint Tommy’s emotional journey.
For the “trauma” stretch of the middle part of the play we came to think of the stage house as a light box portraying the universe inside Tommy’s mind. After Tommy discovers pinball, this light box becomes the guts of a pinball machine, and there are literally dozens of chase sequences that, at times, tested the abilities of our computer board.
After Tommy is released from his trauma, the lighting is often called upon in the black box to create entire scenic images like the vast stadium during the “I’m Free” reprise. The lighting follows a similar color development to the costumes and scenery; white light, to natural color, to strong saturated color and gradually back to white light, tracing Tommy’s journey back to the miracle of reality.
Sound
Nothing has transformed the musical in the last two decades more than the developments in sound design. Steve Kennedy’s work on the sound for Tommy is absolutely crucial in allowing for its style. His task was to achieve the energy and drive of rock-and-roll without destroying the dramatic throughline of the piece. In La Jolla, Steve proved to us that it was possible to maintain the back-beat of the drums while allowing for the subtleties in performance necessary to pull off the understated acting style that we wanted to uphold. The sophistication of Steve’s wireless microphones are directly responsible for the actors’ freedom to behave naturally against and in contrast to the surreal landscape of the production.
In the days when we could only put voices over rock music on stage with hand-held microphones, the work was inherently presentational and somewhat crude. The tremendous sound quality of the Sennheiser microphones that Steve uses gives us the ability to do rock theatre representationally with actors playing scenes with the same standard of truth they would apply to a dramatic play. While this may be a surprising notion, it is my belief that this technology has brought a new humanity to the musical. We can do scene work for the actors more honestly than ever before, even in a scored-through musical like Tommy. We can bring more depth and specificity to performance.
A variety of opinions have circulated within the theatre field and in the critical community about the significance of Tommy. It’s been called revolutionary. It’s been called cold and technical. It’s been described as a new beginning and it’s been attacked as a dead end. It is my own belief that Tommy in fact grows naturally out of the traditions of American musical theatre, regardless of Pete’s foreign accent. Fifty years ago, Oklahoma! opened at the St. James Theatre where Tommy now plays. In one fell swoop, Oklahoma! defined the American musical as dramatic storytelling through popular song, and gave birth to what may prove historically to be our great contribution to Western theatre. It would be hard to argue against the fact that electronic music grew to dominate the American popular music scene within a decade or so of the advent of Oklahoma!, and has continued to do so for close to 40 years.
It is my belief that Tommy absolutely upholds the tradition of Oklahoma! If there is anything different about Tommy it is simply the pace at which the piece moves and the visual nature of the experience it serves up. In Tommy there are dozens of locations and scene shifts, and its story unfolds as if it were on amphetamines. In sharing the duties of descriptive narrative, the production team, in a sense, frees the libretto and score, the direction and choreography, to explore other territory.
Every designer on Tommy listened to the original album over and over. They paid great attention to the music. Just as Guys and Dolls grew out of the stagecraft of the ’40s and the music of Frank Loesser, Tommy comes from our own stagecraft and the music of Pete Townshend. It took 20 years for Tommy to reach the Broadway stage, I believe, because stagecraft has only now caught up to the particular demands of electric music. In much the same way, Tin Pan Alley was around long before Oklahoma!.
Our production of Tommy comes directly out of a musical theatre tradition; it’s just that Tommy is driven by electric music instead of the music we are used to hearing in popular musicals. And it is the back-beat of that very electric music that drove our talented designers to help discover Tommy‘s theatrical aesthetic.
The Director On…
DRUGS: While the subject of drugs is only brought up directly twice on the original album, and then in some obtuse ways, there are many fans who now remember drugs as the centerpiece of the original. This may well have to do with memories of the Russell film (although one of the producer’s theories is that it has more to do with the drugs we were on when we first played the album).
FAMILY VALUES: Pete and I knew that we were bound to disgruntle some Tommy fans by portraying Tommy’s parents and members of his family—including a child-abusing, alcoholic uncle and a vicious, sadistic cousin—as complex characters. It would seem that the lunatic fringe of the Right Wing of the Republican Party has claimed the family as their own, and the rest of us have to look elsewhere for suitable subject matter. In this country we have a bad habit of allowing the Right Wing to lay claim to any concept they choose to distort, including patriotism, sound economics and the family.
POP CULTURE: High on the list of key visual influences that enhanced the imaginistic develop of Tommy is the art movement of the ’60s. It should be remembered that Pete Townshend was something of an innovator in bringing pop art to rock-and-roll—he was the first rock performer that I remember, for instance, to wear the Union Jack flag as a sports jacket.
Tommy has been compared by some to MTV. There is, of course, some similarity in terms of the rapidity of imagery found in some music videos, which tend to be contained, independent ideas or abstractions of pop songs. It’s my view, however, that music television raided the staging ideas of the alternative theatre artists of the 1970s, of which the Tommy team is a part. There is little question that Tommy has served as a meeting ground f or influences from the art world and pop culture.
Des McAnuff co-authored the book of The Who’s Tommy and directed the La Jolla, Broadway, and U.S. tour productions. His next project is the musical’s London production, which is scheduled to open at the Palladium in the summer of 1994.
