The Who's Tommy

Say that you’ve listened to the Who’s Tommy so many times—this is purely hypothetical—you’re inclined to mouth the words unknowingly when witnessing a theatrical incarnation, sitting among a relatively staid audience for Townshend music. If the thing is that deep in your bones, you enter any version of Tommy hopefully. Circle Theatre’s staging, with a single projection screen, a tiny but laudable band and Bob Knuth’s shock-yellow-doused set, mimics McAnuff’s 1993 Broadway staging in miniature, not to terribly disastrous effect. His young cast may not be able to put the story across emotionally, but its often-soaring pipes can buoy it up nonetheless.

It’s a testament to the infectious score—and in particular to Steve Margoshes’s 1993 Broadway arrangement, which amps up numbers like “Christmas” and the ecstatic rock tenor hook on “Sensation”—that we regard Tommy so affectionately. Specifically, we think of it as the show about the deaf, dumb, blind kid who becomes a religious pinball hero rather than the one about the deaf, dumb, blind kid who gets molested by his uncle, mutilated by his cousin and who witnesses his father’s murder at age five. (Though the quick-cutting scenes in Cass’s staging present the narrative clearly enough for those who know the material, I wondered what I always do with Tommy: How ridiculous does this story seem to first-timers?)

Here the numbers that sound best are those sung by the titular torture victim; piercingly blue-eyed McGunn hits high notes literal and figurative. Kevin Bellie’s frenetic choreography is too large for his breadbox stage, and his dancers can’t quite execute it in unison. Surprisingly, though, the choreographer also did the lively projections, which help tie the show together.

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