Theater review part deux: The Who’s Tommy

by Arnold Wayne Jones of Dallas Voice

The Who’s Tommy re-ignites the Metroplex’s premiere theater as relevant and buzz-worthy.

A deaf and blind boy (Heath L. Williams II, pictured with Liz Mikel) becomes a spiritual leader — and an arcade hero — in The Who’s Tommy.

The build-up was almost intolerable. For a year, the Dallas theater community has hoped that the reality of Kevin Moriarty, the new artistic director for the Dallas Theater Center, would match (or at least approach) the promise. The pudding would be Tommy, his directorial debut at the company.

So it was little surprise on Tuesday to see most of the major arts figures in the city — call them “The Who’s Who’s Who” — dressed to the nines in the lobby of the Kalita Humphreys Theater, all hoping to share in the experience of opening night, to decide for themselves what’s hope and what’s hype.

Would it be possible to detach from the anticipation, to evaluate the show on its own merits?

Not only is it possible, it’s a joy. Because Moriarty’s audacious choice to introduce himself artistically — a loud, confusing, industrial-looking rock opera that’s equal parts acid trip, hippie shit and counter-culture bombast — is a signal work for the regional theater, a risky but energizing firecracker of a musical that left me panting.

No doubt there were many patrons who didn’t fully appreciate the onstage musicians — the Denton band oso closo — turning their amps up to 11. Some attendees surely grimaced when the cast began splashing around in four inches of water with enough brio to douse the front row. Purists perhaps sniffed that Pete Townshend had replaced, even momentarily, Rodgers & Hammerstein or even Fats Waller as the composer of their night’s entertainment.

But for the rest of us, Tommy stands as an experience nearly as spiritual as the one undergone by the characters. I have seen the future, and it is rain inside the Kalita.

Rain effects are just one part of the stagecraft that transformed Dallas’ most staid theatrical venue. The DTC, long a champion of beautifully appointed scenery, has discovered the benefits of a little ugliness. Actors make entrances and exits along scaffolding that extends into the loge boxes. Beowulf Boritt’s corrosively stark set feels like the inside of a cauldron, but brilliantly uses water to create a sense of danger and isolation. The costumes are just as on-target, with the color scheme of Greg Robbins’ designs progressing with the story from yellow to red to blue to white — a kind of purification ritual in the primary colors.

Last season on Broadway, Passing Strange stirred more critics than audiences by creating a show that played more like a concert with a plot than a standard book-driven musical. Tommy doesn’t even have a real plot in the traditional sense. It’s more about sensations clustered around a theme.

Tommy (played as an adult by Cedric Neal), incapable of communicating since witnessing his father murder his mother’s lover, exists in a catatonic state, with only a pinball machine for companionship. Tommy eventually emerges from his trance and finds himself anointed a new messiah, a kind of prophet of the pinball.

It’s appropriate, then, that the performance of “Pinball Wizard” stands, without question, as the single best staging of a musical number by a North Texas theater in a decade. Joel Farrell’s choreography alone was sexually explosive enough to induce swoons — as well as sustained applause by the dumbstruck audience.

Not all of the show is received like that, but much of it is. Certainly Liz Mikel’s delivery of “The Acid Queen” is the first number to bring down the house, followed closely by Gregory Lush’s unnervingly funny pedophile, Uncle Ernie.

But when Neal finally gets to sing, more than two-thirds in, the energy level snowballs. Neal’s eyes glow with the fervor of a zealot, and his soaring tenor triggers waves of hair-on-the-neck excitement that continues until the sudden, breathless finale. Even the groovy Godspell/Hair moments that suggest a squishy hippie-cult reverie can’t derail the passion Neal transmits to the audience.

Neal himself is elevated by rockabilly-infused sounds of the quintet oso closo, whose members sing as much of the songs as the actors and who provide all the instrumental music. Moriarty’s decision to incorporate real rock into a rock opera is just the noisiest manifestation of his mission to re-ignite the Metroplex’s premiere theater as relevant and buzz-worthy. The Who’s Tommy not only enshrines that mission as possible, it represents everything local theater needs to be: An unmissable event.