“The Who’s Tommy” Plays the Old Pinball

It starts with a long, breathless introduction, some of it enacted in slightly goofy mime, as the rock instrumental plays: during the Second World War, a welder (Alison Luff) and a Royal Air Force officer, Captain Walker (Adam Jacobs), meet, marry, and lose each other, when he’s sent to Europe and shot down by the Germans during a parachute jump. McAnuff, directing his own show once again, three decades after the original, displays his finest moment of stagecraft here: the projection design (by Peter Nigrini) shows us the inside of a bomber bay, and a line of paratroopers deploys by dropping, one by one, through the floor. Back in England, Tommy is born, and the Air Force mistakenly notifies Mrs. Walker that the captain is never coming back. When he does eventually make it home, he breezes in, shoots his wife’s new lover—don’t bother mourning him; he immediately fades back into the chorus—and traumatizes his four-year-old son. (I saw Cecilia Ann Popp as the youngest Tommy.) Tommy’s parents insist to him, “You didn’t hear it / you didn’t see it,” inducing in the child a total psychic block—he can no longer sense the world.