THE OLD PINBALL

"The Who's Tommy" returns.

- HELEN SHAW

It's been a long, wild trip since 1969, when the opening chords of Pete Townshend's "Tommy," written with and recorded by the Who, first blasted onstage. The band toured the genre-defying album a seeker's rock opera in which a "deaf, dumb, and blind kid" discovers a messianic gift for pinball-for several years. Throughout the next decade, other artists took a crack at the Who's material: there was a ballet, a symphony, and Ken Russell's nutterbutter psychedelic film, in 1975. Then, about fifteen years after the Who had more or less put "Tommy" away, the director Des McAnuff convinced Townshend that, together, they could turn it into a musical. The result smashed onto Broadway in 1993. A whole bunch of folks won Tony Awards; certainly, everybody made money. So, thirty years later, here we are again.

Or, rather, we're trying to be there again. Which "there"-the seventies? the nineties? may depend on your age. It will also depend on whether your "Tommy" preferences lean toward the rawness of the band's concerts (which the lead singer, Roger Daltrey, once referred to fondly as a "bum note and a bead of sweat") or toward Broadway's glossy, show-and-alsotell approach. Is it a good idea to act out the lyrics of a song about a mystical drugged-out prostitute? Responses will vary. Either way, now at the Nederlander, nostalgia is being delivered by brute force. Before this outing, I had never seen "The Who's Tommy" in a theatre, but when I heard the overture's guitar chords, hissing with cymbals, I felt a shudder of false memory. The sound designer Gareth Owen has added a recording of a roaring crowd to the performance's first few moments, and I found myself remembering stadiums that I'd never been in. But, yeesh, then the show gets going.