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This weekend we went to “Tommy the Musical”. 35 Years after the album, the music is still great. Considered that Tommy was the first — so called — rock opera and opened a complete new genre.

This version of the musical was visually fantastic! A minor flaw in one of the ‘light’ boards caused a 15 minutes pause and two scenes had to be done again. I think that with having more and more electronics used make these shows a bit over-engineered and vulnerable to any kind of problems. The music was ok. The musicians were sitting above the stage and gave a good performance. It was nice to used real horns in a few of the songs instead of synthesizers.

“Captain Walker didn’t come home, his unborn child will never know him…
Believe him missing with a number of men; never expect to see him again…” — The Who

The singing was a bit below my expectations. Knowing the original Tommy very well, I was a bit disappointed. Take “cousin Kevin” for example. Although he’s an awful boy, I didn’t expect to have him to sing awfully! Most of the singing had also a bit of ‘musical’ tone over it. This was especially the case with Mr. and Mrs. Walker and does make it an ordinary musical instead of “Rock Opera”. Uncle Ernie however had a great performance; even with the singing! So from a musical perspective it was not very strong and below the original album, but also not as good as the performance we’ve seen in London a few years back.

The original story was a bit altered in the musical. Originally the story was around the first world war. For some reason the musical is now situated around the second world war. It sounds a bit strange then having the actors to sing: “1921 is going to be a good year”!