Wichita’s Forum Theatre closes out its run of “The Who’s Tommy” this weekend with performances running Thursday, Oct. 3, through Sunday, Oct 6. (Thursday-Saturday performances begin at 8 p.m. while the Sunday show is a 2 p.m. matinee.)
The rock opera was first released as The Who’s fourth studio album in 1969. Written primarily by Pete Townshend, it was indicative of the composer’s ambitions, whether replicating a pirate radio broadcast (“The Who Sell Out”) or creating an operetta (“A Quick One, While He’s Away”).
“Tommy” deals with a broad range of issues, encapsulating the traumas of post-World War II Britain, spiritual experimentation and child sexual abuse.
The album became a cornerstone of The Who’s discography and was adapted for other media, including ballet and opera performances, and the hallucinatory 1972 Ken Russell-directed film, which starred Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margaret and a wide range of rock ‘n’ roll luminaries.
In 1992, it was successfully adapted for the stage with a Broadway run beginning the following year. It received several Tony Awards in its initial iteration and earned further accolades via its 2024 Broadway revival.
The Forum’s Kathy Page-Hauptman recently spoke with KMUW about the current Wichita production.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Usually, I wind up speaking with someone from the theater community before a show opens, but we’re speaking as you’re about to go into the final performances. How’s it been going?
It’s been good. People have responded very well to the show. It’s a challenging show but very, very entertaining. It’s a show that people don’t see very often. It’s not done a lot. There was a recent revival on Broadway [that was very successful]. But it’s not one of those traditional pieces that you see all the time.
People have described it as mesmerizing. From the moment you start, you can’t take your eyes off the stage, and you get totally engrossed in the story and the rock ‘n’ roll music by Pete Townshend is just incredible.
What made this a show for this season?
“Tommy” was first [staged on Broadway in 1993]. Then there was the revival this year. It deals with themes of accepting people that are different. Dealing with people who have been traumatized by some kind of assault or abuse. I know when they did the revival in Chicago [people] commented on how timely it seems and also about stardom. People that we put on pedestals, and we only believe in them and follow them when they’re on that pedestal. When they fall or we knock them down, we turn our backs on them. This show deals with a lot of those themes that are very contemporary, that we deal with all the time right now in some way or other.
I wonder if you’ve had a chance to interact with the people who have come to see the show. I would assume that there are some people who maybe knew of the album, or they had a foggy notion that it had been adapted for stage and that this was their first real interaction with it.
We actually did a post-show discussion [after a recent Sunday performance]. That was a lot of [what we heard]. People knew of the music, or they knew of a song, but they didn’t know the story behind it. They didn’t know that Pete Townshend was such a great storyteller. They loved the story. They loved the challenge of it. We talked about the messiah complex that we deal with right now in our current society. That kind of stardom. We talked about the differences in how abuse is handled now as opposed to when the show was originally written.
There was a lot of really intelligent conversation that took place around the show, but the overall comment was about how much they enjoyed it, how much they enjoyed seeing it. They just were mesmerized by the entire story the entire time.
The music is really wonderful. I think there’s this image of The Who as this macho rock ‘n’ roll band and “Tommy” in particular is a great example of the kind of diversity Townshend had in his compositional bag.
Yes, it really runs the gamut of being full-out rock ‘n’ roll to really beautiful music that was written in tender moments. I was reading something just the other day about Pete Townshend that I did not know, that The Who, although they were really popular, they were not as financially successful as a lot of the other big bands that we think of, that they often struggled, that [Townshend] often took other jobs. Because his music was slightly different, it didn’t fall into that mold of popular rock ‘n’ roll music. It had a different side to it. I didn’t realize that. You can see it with this show because it does cross several types of musical [styles].
