The Who's Tommy.

I never understood viscerally what being outside the loop meant until I went to see The Who's Tommy, which had been called simply Tommy in most of the preopening publicity until it occurred to the producers that there might be people like a friend of mine who wondered if it was about English soldiers in World War I. The audience was full of aging young people who knew the music and responded enthusiastically, often in anticipation of a song that had been signaled by its opening notes. So nostalgic a reaction could hardly be expected by someone like me, who grew up on Harry James and Larry Clinton and for whom The Who was little more than a recognizable name. I did see the gaudy film Ken Russell made of the rock opera in 1975, but I have no clear memory of it: in one ear/eye and out the other. So I came to the new musical as a relative innocent.

It is a lapel-grabbing show that commands attention and has been nominated for eleven Tony Awards. The music, as one would expect, is played at very high volume, appropriately for songs like "I'm Free" and the somewhat extraneous "Acid Queen." But even songs like "See Me, Feel Me," which seems to me both musically and lyrically sentimental, and the uplifting "Welcome" assault rather than tickle the ear drums. I often found it difficult to understand the lyrics, as in Paul Kandel's rendition of Uncle Emie's "Fiddle About," but that goes with the territory; I have spent decades failing to hear lyrics that young listeners seem to have no trouble learning, and, when they have been repeated to me, that hardly seemed worth remembering. If I sound simply querulous in this paragraph, I apologize. I am not really the father from Bye, Bye Birdie, who asked in "Kids" what's wrong with Sammy Kaye. If Tommy's music is not my music, I suspect that it is also not the music of the rap generation. For us outsiders, its acceptance depends on the way it works within the show.

The production as a whole pushes as the music does. It is staged by Des McAnuff and choreographer Wayne Cilento so that there is seldom a pause in the action, except for the blind, deaf, and dumb Tommy who stands catatonically while the churning business goes on around him. When hurrying on foot is not enough, there are the high-fly wires that let the adult Tommy Peter Pan in to comfort his earlier selves. The staging is a wonder of high-tech graphics - projections, videos, special effects - that keep the eye darting from screen to screen, from one corner of the stage to another. Most of them are intensifications of plot developments or images of the confused mind of Tommy. While the show is in progress, it is difficult not to be pulled into all that light and sound, and that, after all, is what theater is supposed to do. It was only as I left the theater, my ears and eyes settling down, that I began to wonder what all this flamboyance was in aid of. That is where the book comes in.

Tommy is the story of a young boy, the witness of a murder, who, exhorted to silence by his parents, becomes deaf, dumb, and blind. He becomes a pinball wizard, as the song says, and once his senses return in a mirror-breaking moment, he becomes a superstar, a cruel cult figure, and, finally, over the protests of his followers, a normal fellow - even as you and I. The book has been rewritten by the musical's chief composer/lyricist, Peter Townshend, and director McAnuff in a way that deeply offends true believers from the past like Jon Pareles, who complained in the New York Times (April 27), "Their changes turn a blast of spiritual yearning, confusion, and rebellion into a pat on the head for nesters and couch potatoes." If so, it is an odd turning. I assume that Tommy's return to his family, the presumed embrace of normalcy, is supposed to make the musical more appealing in a less questioning time than the 1960s. Still, the family consists not only of the parents, who committed or condoned a murder, but of Uncle Eddie, who sexually abused the helpless Tommy, and Cousin Kevin, who tortured the boy with and without the help of his fellow teen-age thugs. This sounds like an occasion for a bitterly ironic curtain, but the music seems to be saying that now everything is hunky-dory.

The row of television screens across the top of the stage at Tommy seemed familiar, and then I recalled that a few days earlier I had seen a similar row across the bottom of the stage at the Annenberg Center in Philadelphia when the American Music Theater Festival presented the world premiere of Stories from the Nerve Bible with words, images, and music by Laurie Anderson. There seemed less music than in other Anderson shows I have seen, but it was the usual electronically manipulated sounds, and the words, delivered in her conversationally charming way, either added up to rather appealing stories or came across as poetic platitudes. It was the technical effects, however, that gave the show its special quality. Unlike Tommy, in which the images were plot-based, Anderson's images, except when they spelled out the words she had just spoken, were social/political comments (a burning house that turned into a burning book, the Desert Storm bomb strikes) or sometimes comic routines. There was a funny one which made a dance from shots of people coming out of rest rooms. The images could be seen either on the platoon of television sets or else on multiple screens - one of them a globe - hanging overhead. The visual high point of the show was a laser creation in which Anderson seemed to be entering a mysterious bright-light cave with only her violin bow as weapon. I have no idea what it meant if it meant anything other than that the audience was supposed to be dazzled by the effect. As usual with Laurie Anderson productions, I found myself attracted to a work which, had it been shorn of its fascinating effects, reduced to what rather than how Anderson was communicating, would have seemed commonplace.