Review: The Who’s Tommy is reborn in brilliant production at Playbox Theatre

Review: Tommy, Dream Factory, Warwick, 19th to 22nd June

How’s this for an elevator pitch? There’s this kid. He can’t hear. He can’t see. And he can’t sing. Yup, that’s right, he’s deaf, dumb and blind. Did I mention it’s a musical?

You’d be booted out as soon as the doors opened at the next floor, right?

Wrong. Incredibly, The Who’s Tommy started life as a concept album in 1969, was reborn psychedelically as a movie in 1975 and, despite obvious impediments, was reworked again into a successful stage musical in 1993.

And now here’s a fresh take on the world’s most famous rock opera from Playbox Theatre. It’s a bold choice that’s for sure cos Mary Poppins it ain’t.

For starters there’s child abuse, murder, drug-taking, medical quackery, religious chicanery, prophet profiteering and physical bullying among the many misdemeanours to negotiate into acceptable entertainment and yet, against all these odds, you couldn’t ask for a more vivacious, joyous and uplifting performance than this one at the Dream Factory.

It should really come as no surprise. Playbox is a company growing more famous by the generation for its adventurous programming so it’s wholly characteristic of them to take the risk, embrace the challenge and fashion a superb all-ages summer spectacle from such formidable, occasionally dubious, material.

Briefly here’s the gist. A young woman helping out on the home front during WW2 meets and weds a handsome young soldier. He goes off to war and gets captured by the Nazis. She gives birth to a son and then shacks up with another dude as she’s been informed that her hubby, Captain Walker, is missing presumed dead.

The war ends, Captain Walker returns, there’s a scuffle, the dude gets killed and in the panic, the son, who’s witnessed it all, is told he didn’t hear or see anything and is never to speak of it to anyone again.

The Captain gets away with the murder due to the circumstances but the boy remains shut down and unresponsive. The parents try loads of things to get him to snap out of it and when he finally recovers his faculties, having become the greatest pinball champion on earth, playing by sense of smell, he’s treated as a messiah. Various factions cash in on his celebrity, he gets tired of it all, packs it in and reconciles with his family.

This basic plot has shouldered several revisions during its lifetime. The musical has smoothed out some of the edgier elements to make it easier on audiences and changes have been made which, it must be said, don’t entirely help the narrative hold together.

For instance, mention Tommy to anyone aged 50 or above and I guarantee their reaction will be, “Fiddle about. Fiddle about.” I know his for a fact as it happened to me several times last week.

Fiddle About is the song that Uncle Ernie sings while sexually molesting the pre-pubescent Tommy. Ernie is portrayed in the film with horrific relish by The Who’s drummer Keith Moon. Understandably, but disappointingly from a dramatic point of view, the song is excised from this production, substituted after two lines by a neon red strobed lighting effect, a modesty manoeuvre which robs Jack Hobson’s splendidly sinister drunken Unc of one of his big moments. No worries though, Hobson is granted his due reward a little later, earning his own very well-deserved round of whoops and applause when he dons straw boater and cane and opens Tommy’s Holiday Camp, a tacky cash-in on his nephew’s celebrity which provides a handy free rein to prey upon a chorus line of nubile bathing beauties. Old school creepy git.

Thankfully Elysia Sully gets to go fabulously full-on femme fatale-for-hire as the Acid Queen despite the fact that a softening of plot means she doesn’t actually get to do anything to the 10-year-old Tommy, druggy or otherwise. The boy’s scooped up out of her clutches by Elliot Barlow’s Captain Walker who, at his wit’s end to cure him, seems to have had an inexplicable change of mind about trying to shock his son carnally and chemically into adolescence.

Barlow plays Walker well as a stand-up guy and shares most of his numbers with Jennie Beattie who plays his wife, Tommy’s mum, exquisitely. What About The Boy? Is a touchingly stressed-out duet and, as the pair are driven to exasperation by their son’s lack of communicative desire, Beattie brings the proverbial house down with her frustration rising to a remarkable vocal crescendo during Smash The Mirror.

Do You Think It’s Alright (To Leave The Boy With Uncle Ernie)? though, is one of the stupidest pieces of musical theatre ever written. Uh, hello? Get me Childline!

The way the musical was adapted back in the ‘90s, there are even more plot holes than there are pot-holes in the roads around here but Juliet Vankay’s keen direction and acute casting keep the show bombing along with such zest it’s not much of a problem. The spectacularly choreographed scenes pile one upon another with a heart-pumping rapidity, expertly propelled by a tight, dynamic live four-piece band up on the balcony rather than a taped soundtrack – a brave move which pays off handsomely, adding to the feel that we are attending a very special occasion, each show of the five unique in its own way.

Scenario after scenario skittles by, cranked up to maximum excitement by a nimble, febrile ensemble including Dylan Somanathan (Dude who gets offed, Acid Queen’s pimp), Giulia Isoni (Sally Simpson, Tommy’s most ardent fan), Celine Delahaye (Priest, security) and Mery Sutherland (Hawker, security and disillusioned disciple) with assembly-led numbers Christmas and We’re Not Gonna Take It stand-outs. Pinball Wizard is the show’s pivot and greatest number here – a rowdy set-piece that ushers in the transition from dark domestic drama to cult celebration.

As it’s an opera, the chances on offer for actual “acting” in the traditional sense are few and far between since the exposition of the plot is advanced via overlapping songs almost all of the time. But when such thespian opportunities do arise, they are hungrily seized upon.

Aria Winterburn-Langdon’s pre-traumatised Tommy is a little ray of sunshine and, when the shock hits, she’s stunned and stunning. Sebastian Rokison-Woodall’s catatonic 10-year-old is a heck of a study in non-expression, static, immune to all the stimuli the ensemble hurl at and heap upon him. And then, at the other end of the Richter scale of flamboyancy, there’s Nathanael Saleh glorying in the sado-comic role of Cousin Kevin, the school bully who manically experiments on Tommy for kicks via a dustbin and some cigarette burns.

Quillan Mitchell is the grown-up Tommy and every bit the star of the show. Resplendent in a white suit resembling the one George Harrison used to loaf about in, Mitchell is by turns comatose, tender stubborn, angry and amazed – not necessarily in that order and sometimes all at once. His takes on See Me Feel Me and Listening to You are emotionally impeccable, his range extraordinary and his stage presence subtly, then forcefully, bang-on.

This was Playbox’s seasonal finale and the last hurrah for many of the cast scooting off to college in the autumn. After the Saturday evening show, the entourage assembled outside for the Playbox Midsummer Revels where some of the actors transformed into the Domesday Band and busked a cool set of songs climaxing with an impromptu rapturously received reprise of Pinball Wizard with cast, crew and crowd all together, having the time of their lives.