The Who’s Tommy
Opening Night: March 28, 2024
Theater: Nederlander Theatre
Website: tommythemusical.com
After witnessing his father shoot his rival, the young Tommy Walker is lost in the universe, endlessly and obsessively staring into the mirror. An innate knack for pinball catapults him from reticent adolescent to celebrity savior.
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March 28, 2024
This parade of odd plot points and narrational perplexities passes quite swiftly — perhaps, at little more than two hours, too swiftly, as the story is hard to follow and harder to swallow.
March 29, 2024
If the first 10 minutes of a show are supposed to rope you in, “The Who’s Tommy” dares you to need more than 10 seconds. Director Des McAnuff’s revival staging of the electric rock opera he co-wrote explodes onto the Nederlander Theatre stage in a paroxysm of booming sound, blinding light and crackling projections
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March 28, 2024
With a superb cast headed by Broadway newcomer Ali Louis Bourzgui as Tommy, the “deaf, dumb and blind kid” – most of whatever language less-than-acceptable by today’s standards has been retained – and Alison Luff as his mom Mrs. Walker, Tommy feels less like a stick-to-what-works revival than a top-to-bottom reimagining. Nearly all of it works beautifully.
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March 28, 2024
And yet, despite these problems, the show works, and its epic choral finale somehow feels genuinely rousing and healing. As musical theater, Tommy is limited. On its own terms, it’s often sensational.
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March 28, 2024
With Tommy, if the dissonance is sometimes distancing, it’s also fascinating. Though I spent long stretches of the show intrigued and amused rather than earnestly rocking out, I was never not entertained. I had plenty of questions, but I also had a damn good time.
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March 28, 2024
Truth be told, I was not expecting to be as bowled over by this story, or this revival, as I was. But there’s no arguing with talent, and with so much prowess on and off the stage, Tommy is an electric paean to rock immortality, and talent wherever one can find it.
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March 28, 2024
This new version adds another layer, exploring how our overreliance on technology can turn us into mindless sheep. It had me from start to finish, and it’s an amazing journey I’d love to take again.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 28, 2024
In 1975,Tommy was adapted into a deliciously delirious film that featured the tagline, “Your senses will never be the same.” Now, The Who’s Tommy carries that torch forward in its own radical, one-of-a-kind adventure that truly has to be seen to be believed. See it, feel it — you won’t forget it.
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March 28, 2024
Well, McAnuff is back at it with a new revival of “The Who’s Tommy” that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theatre, and it made me want to see the Russell movie again.
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March 28, 2024
The quaking revival of Pete Townshend’s seminal rock opera, which opened Thursday night at the Nederlander Theater after nearly three decades away, really is an espresso martini of a show after a chamomile-tea season of musicals.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 28, 2024
A big blast of boomer pleasure has arrived on Broadway at the Nederlander Theatre, where the thunderous and thoroughly intoxicating revival of “The Who’s Tommy” has opened, giving a seismic jolt to the mostly lusterless musical season.
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March 28, 2024
Now, though, the world has spun forward enough times to meet “Tommy” where it always lived, meaning its psychologically oriented story of delayed self-actualization due to childhood trauma, and its withering parody of abusive authority figures and celebrity worship.
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The great news is that what precedes and follows this moment also stirs and tickles the senses. That’s the way this rock opera rolls, as it spins the story of a boy so deeply damaged by life – first by his parents and later by his abusive uncle and creepy cousin – that he nearly shuts down completely.
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