THEATRE PREVIEW:

“THE WHO'S TOMMY” at Copley Symphony Hall

Published in San Diego Union-Tribune August, 1994

Question: What weighs 20 tons, costs $3.5 million and travels around the country in 13 semi trucks?

Answer: Tommy.

He's back. The touring production of the blockbuster musical, "The Who's Tommy," is returning to the place of its birth, for sixteen performances at Copley Symphony Hall (August 24-September 4). At its inception two years ago, the theatrical version of the Who's song cycle of 1969 broke all records at the La Jolla Playhouse, with a six-week extension totaling 110 performances. It was an SRO (Standing Room Only) sellout, capped by a nightly standing ovation.

Then it went to Broadway (currently in its 72nd week, with $2 million advance sales), and got bigger and more elaborate. Now it's on the road, and San Diego is the 27th stop on a tour that began in October 1993 and ends January 1995. This is considered to be one of the most complex, technically sophisticated productions to tour America -- broadly but briefly. That means many cities, with only one to two week runs. Other touring productions, such as "The Phantom of the Opera," may be equally opulent, but they wouldn't dream of going to small venues for short stays.

"Tommy," however, winner of five Tony Awards, six Drama Desk Awards and three Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Outstanding Musical of 1993, is, like its creators, somewhat iconoclastic.

Its familiar, hard-driving score is by Pete Townshend, legendary songwriter and guitarist for the Who, from 1964 to 1982. The book is by Townshend and La Jolla Playhouse artistic director Des McAnuff, who directed the show in La Jolla, on Broadway and on tour.

The story concerns a traumatized child who transcends the miseries of his childhood by achieving mystical fame as a deaf-dumb-blind pinball wizard. The production is a kinetic, kaleidoscopic, video-infused dream for the audience, but a nightmare for the technical crew. Of the nine Broadway and seven touring productions stage manager David Foster has worked, "Tommy" is "by far the most complicated."

Consider the components: twenty tons of equipment, including 27 still-image projectors and 30-foot wide screens that create an ever-changing backdrop for the non-stop action; 34 TV monitors, seven smoke/fog machines, a portable floor with 14 computer-controlled "dogs" that transport set pieces; and an exploding pinball machine that flies, spins, sparks and shoots out a 12-foot flame.

Foster has a total of 80 scene-change cues to call in two hours. This requires 65 people sweating backstage (in addition to the 30 people sweating onstage). The tour travels with 27 stagehands and hires some 55 locals at each stop. But running the show itself is not Foster's biggest problem; it's moving the whole shebang into a small theater.

This problem is magnified at Symphony Hall. In most theaters, the trucks just back up to the stage door. But here, the loading dock is on a hill, with a freight elevator 2 1/2 stories up. A normal load-in takes about two days, anywhere from 20-24 labor-hours. Foster is shooting for a 24-hour San Diego load-in, but the calculations have been off before. The show has opened one or two days late in numerous cities. Locals are taking no chances. According to Rory Gaetzman, local operations manager for the Nederlander Organization and San Diego Playgoers, the San Diego load-in schedule is set for 38 labor-hours.

And it doesn't get easier once the gear is in. Since there is insufficient wing-space in the theater, all the set pieces must be hung overhead in stacks, filling 50 feet of fly-space, then lowered by winch motor onto the stage floor. This technicality actually has some significance for the audience, because it means we don't get to see Tommy fly, as we did in La Jolla. Only nine or ten cities have had that opportunity so far.

It wasn't the most spectacular effect anyway. That designation would have to go to the six-man parachute jump, which we will get to see, albeit reconfigured (via an elaborate contraption fondly referred to as "Bertha," the bomber-in-a-box). We also won't miss the dazzling second-act effect when the entire theater is transformed into a giant pinball machine, enveloping onlookers with lights, bells and buzzers.

Another San Diego snag concerned the length of the show's local run. Initially scheduled for three weeks, "Tommy's" visit was later scaled back to two weeks. Some think this might be due to sluggish ticket sales, which are reportedly going well, if not as feverishly as last month. Scott Zeiger, President of PACE Theatrical Group, the co-producer of "Tommy," says "we're very optimistic about the San Diego response, and we will make our nut" (i.e., break even).

In most cities, the marketing strategy has been to announce a shorter engagement at first, and then an extension "due to overwhelming demand." San Diego got a diminution instead of an extension, which Zeiger attributes to the intrusion of Labor Day and the Jewish holidays, plus a long drive to Denver, the show's next stop. Since it wasn't possible to fit in the full eight weekly performances that conform to union (Equity) contracts, the run was cut from three weeks to two.

But that's all backstage and behind the scenes. Everyone involved with the production is quick to say that what we get onstage is not a scaled-down or truncated version of the original. This road show is unique because the touring production is not a redesign of the Broadway blitz; it's a duplication of it. So San Diegans will actually see more than they saw in La Jolla.

The second act, criticized by many, was rewritten for Broadway. The images were clarified, reprises and a new ballad were added, according to Lisa Portes, who was assistant director to McAnuff in La Jolla and New York and now again on the road. She will be handling the majority of staging responsibilities for the 1995 Toronto and Frankfurt productions.

"Des (McAnuff) and Pete (Townshend) fleshed out Tommy's growth and spiritual journey," Portes explains. "Before, he woke up already spiritually aware. Now he wakes up angry, then comes to awareness, and finally wakes up to his family and reconciles with them. It's as if he has two awakenings."

That second awakening, the family reconciliation, has engendered mixed reactions. Purists see it as a copout, a softening of the gritty, hard edge of the '60s original. In many ways, "Tommy" has been stripped of the sex, drugs and hard-hitting rock & roll of its roots. But times change, sensibilities change. And this is, after all, a Broadway musical, not a guitar-smashing rock concert.

Still, it seems incredible to serious Tommymaniacs that the guy who's been traumatized by his parents and abused by his uncle and cousin would reconcile with everyone at the end. But both Townshend and McAnuff have reached middle age now, and faced with young children at home, both may be soft on family unity.

To Portes, the play's final incantation, "Listening to You," sung by the cast to the audience, is "really a secular prayer, as opposed to a spiritual awakening to a higher being. It's a moment of grounding spirituality in the world you live in now, the people you live with now, faulty or beautiful as they may be... Tommy's journey is true to the human experience in the latter part of the 20th century: From extreme trust in family, to extreme alienation, to rage, to pursuing one's own obsessions with a vengeance, to understanding how the world works, how one can live in it and have faith in it."

In his recent writings about "Tommy" (a book of essays was published by Pantheon/Random House in 1993, and a CD-ROM is due at Christmastime from RoundBook in Scotts Valley, CA), McAnuff has conceded that many of the changes in the script brought it closer to Townshend's life story.

The piece was moved from the original World War I timeframe to WWII and Townshend's postwar g-g-generation, spanning 1940 to 1963, from the blitzkrieg to the British rock & roll invasion. As McAnuff explains it, the pinball is a metaphor for rock & roll, and Tommy's autistic-like isolation is "a metaphor for the dynamic between confrontation and escape that goes on at the moment of teenage rebellion... The pinball machine was really a Stratocaster (electric guitar) and that completed the notion of Pete really being Tommy."

So Tommy goes back to his family, and now his story is coming back to its birthplace. That fact is not lost on anyone involved. "It's like going home after being away a long time," says stage manager Foster. "You want to look good and be your best. It's Tommy's home."

DATEBOOK

"THE WHO'S TOMMY"

The blockbuster musical, born at the La Jolla Playhouse, previews August 24 (8 p.m.) and August 25 (5 and 9 p.m.) and opens Thursday, August 26, for 13 performances. Tuesday-Friday 8 p.m. Saturday 2 and 8 p.m. Sunday 2 and 7 p.m. Through September 4. Copley Symphony Hall, 750 B Street. $29-47.50; 220-TIXS.

©1994 Patté Productions Inc.