By Steve Sucato
The opening of the 2026 North American Tour of THE WHO’S TOMMY The Musical at Playhouse Square’s Connor Palace Theatre on October 7, if you’ll pardon the cliché, rocked!
The third incarnation of the five-time Tony Award®-winning 1993 rock opera was a flashy multimedia spectacle of music, dance, and drama that bridged mid- to late-20th-century and 21st-century British zeitgeists.
Dubbed “TOMMY 3.0,” in a curtain speech by Tony Award®-winning original director of the musical, Des McAnuff, TOMMY The Musical is based on rock band The Who’s 1969 groundbreaking album “TOMMY,” with music and lyrics by rock legend and Tony Award® Winner Pete Townshend, with additional music by late Who bassist John Entwistle and blues harmonica giant Sonny Boy Williamson II.
Photo by Doug Gifford.
Following the musical’s original book by Townshend and McAnuff, the updated production, like its predecessor, used the album’s lyrics as dialogue to tell the rather disturbing story of young Tommy Walker.
Set in past, present, and future London, the 100-minute, two-act, 23-scene musical with no intermission followed Walker from birth to adulthood. It opened with a futuristic scene of Tommy as an adult and a beloved cult figure, then rewound to his birth.
The son of WWII RAF pilot Captain Walker (Zach Foge), who was shot down and held in a German POW camp for four years. Tommy and his mother are informed by the RAF that he is dead. Mrs. Walker begins seeing another man (Greyson Taylor), who becomes a surrogate father to Tommy. Tragedy strikes when Captain Walker returns home from the war to find his wife in the arms of her new lover. A fight ensues, and Captain Walker fatally shoots the other man in self-defense.
Traumatized by his father’s seeming return from the dead, his shooting of his pseudo-stepfather, and being emphatically told by his panicked parents that he didn’t see or hear anything and that he can never speak of the shooting, Tommy retreats into himself, shutting down his ability to see, hear, and speak.
Click here to read the full review on Broadway World
