‘The Who’s Tommy’ Review: Going Full Tilt

That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with “The Magic Flute.”

Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there’s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.

Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form — enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, long since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.

Who’s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear’s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.

Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.

To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.