Pete Townshend‘s award-winning rock opera, The Who’s Tommy, is returning to Broadway where it originally premiered in 1993. This coming March, The Who’s Tommy will begin a run at Nederlander Theatre in a reimagined production from director and original collaborator Des McAnuff and The Who’s Pete Townshend. The show begins in a limited run on March 8 and opens fully on March 28. The band announced the revival in a post on Instagram.
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The Who’s Tommy is based on The Who‘s 1969 concept album of the same name, which follows a young boy named Tommy who becomes catatonic after witnessing his father kill someone. Later, he breaks out of his catatonic state and becomes an international pinball superstar. There are subtle differences between the album and the stage production, but the general storylines are similar, and the album is heavily referenced throughout the show.
The original show opened in 1993 and closed in 1995, with a London production in 1997, a revival by the original cast in 2008, as well as a revival last year in Chicago. Now, it’s returning home to Broadway where it all started. The 1993 production won numerous awards, including five Tonys, four Drama Desk Awards, one Grammy, and a Theatre World Award. The original production gave a total of 899 performances in the span of three years.
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“What a show like [Tommy] does is focus attention on great work the Who did,” Pete Townshend said to music journalist Wayne Robins in 1993, as quoted on Robins’ Substack. “To some extent, rock ‘n’ roll thrives on spectacle and chaos, in a publicity sense, and we had our share of that . . . The kind of rock and roll moments you can get away with, the license you have in rock and roll, doesn’t transfer to theater.”
Townshend continued, explaining the difference between rock ‘n’ roll and theatre in that 1993 interview. “Life is where the work gets done,” he posited. “Rock ‘n’ roll is where the expression and effusion takes place. Theater’s not quite the same. Theater is expression and effusion and having release and abandon and all of those things, but when you get up to walk out, what you want to do is talk about it, debate with yourself and your friends, whether or not the people who put the show together have got it right.”
That difference, the “beginning, middle, and long fade,” as Townshend put it, is crucial for translating rock ‘n’ roll into theater, and The Who’s Tommy smartly took on topics that weren’t typically discussed at the time of the album’s writing. Now, the show is addressing those topics still, but with a nod to modern times.
“In 1969, when I originally wrote Tommy with The Who, nobody had ever written popular music songs about trauma, nobody talked about bullying, domestic sexual abuse was a subject that was virtually censored,” Townshend said recently in a press release about the new Broadway revival. “Then, in 1993, working with Des on the staged theatre piece, we broke the established rules for a musical show. Now, the current generation is breaking all of those rules again—and what Des has achieved with this incredible new production honors them and their courage and audacity.”
He continued, “I can’t wait to see how this newly empowered show connects with younger Broadway audiences today. I hope the younger ones come, for they will identify in an entirely new and important way with Tommy’s tumultuous life. Meanwhile, longtime fans of Tommy, The Who and all their music will be blown away by this new show.”
Photo by P. Floyd/Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
