Interview: Des McAnuff Talks About How Broadway’s Tommy Has New Meaning for Today

Des McAnuff co-wrote the book for The Who’s Tommy with Pete Townshend and directed the first production on Broadway in 1993. He won a Tony Award for his direction and was nominated for the book, yet there were still new discoveries to be made in the piece. Now he’s back directing the show’s first Broadway revival at the Nederlander Theatre.

McAnuff and Townshend were working on developing a new screenplay and realized that now would be the time for a fresh Tommy on the stage. Based on the 1969 concept album, the rock opera is about Tommy Walker, who loses his sight, hearing, and speech after witnessing his father murder his mother’s lover. He gains fame for his pinball abilities and eventually gets back his senses, becoming a leader to his cultlike following. “Everybody’s walking around looking into a mirror, albeit a black one,” McAnuff says. “There’s this impulse to escape within to get away from a hostile world, and so without having to change the story all that dramatically, we felt it had new meaning.”

McAnuff, whose other directing credits include Jersey Boys and Ain’t Too Proud, recently spoke with TheaterMania about the concept for the revival, his extensive career, and the kind of director he’s become.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What were some of the discoveries you had that made you want to direct Tommy again?
The national conversation, and I suppose international conversation now, is about bullying and abuse, so that made it meaningful to dig back into the story. It’s very much on people’s minds in a way that I don’t think it was 30 years ago. Post-traumatic stress disorder was not something that we were talking about all that much. Maybe the most meaningful thing for both of us had to do with the fact that Tommy becomes a guru, an imam, a pop star, a spiritual leader, the head of a political movement, and the most common term — which of course wasn’t around 30 years ago — an influencer. He has a huge following and a tremendous amount of power based on his amazing journey. Some of us are more weary of that kind of leadership and when Tommy has his main epiphany, it has to do with this role that he’s willingly played to lead all these people. That’s what makes Tommy a remarkable person, that he at the end of the day gives up celebrity. While perhaps not brand-new ideas, I think they took on a greater resonance in the world we live in.

You mentioned the way we talk about trauma now has changed. Did anything in the rehearsal room change in the way you would talk about the events of the show?
I certainly have longer anecdotes than I did 30 years ago because I’ve just lived longer. You’re always trying to contextualize what’s going on. I use my own experience as Pete did in the writing of it. My dad was RAF and was actually killed six months before I was born. And I had a new father when I turned 4 which is very much like Tommy’s experience. I experienced abuse and bullying as I believe did Pete, although I wouldn’t presume to speak for him. It’s very important to find ways to speak about some of these things with the kids and to speak in a language that they understand. There’s nothing wrong with kids being on the lookout or being aware of the existence of predators because the last line of defense is of course the kids themselves and I have the help of a very good handler on our show who does a magnificent job. In talking to those four kids [the child actors who play Tommy at ages 4 and 10], I try to use a vocabulary that they’re going to understand so it doesn’t scare them, but at the same time it gives them an understanding of the story they’re telling.

How did you come up with the futuristic concept for the revival?
There’s always been an abstraction in terms of the timeline. It’s a fable. So, you don’t have to be pinned down by the passage of time. And time becomes one of the colors in our paint box. There’s a great Orwell quote from 1984 where he says, “He that controls the past controls the future and he that controls the present controls the past,” and as Tommy becomes this leader that was very much on our minds and we were able to use the passage of time in a much more abstract way. It allows us to imply that the themes of Tommy don’t only apply to the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s, but they apply to today and beyond.

One thing I noticed is that Uncle Ernie seems conflicted in this production, not that that excuses what he does. Was that intentional?
John [Ambrosino], who is a fantastic actor who plays the part, understands that there are contradictions in that kind of person. Uncle Ernie didn’t get to go to war. His brother did. He thought his brother died over there. That caused him a particular kind of agony and he started to drink, and he’s clearly drunk when the scene happens. Do we forgive him for that? Absolutely not. And Tommy doesn’t forgive him either. At the end, we’re very careful to make it clear that there’s a distance that’s never going to get bridged between them, that what he did was unforgivable. But at the same time, he’s not just a simplistic bad guy. As you pointed out, I think there is nuance and some complexity there.

What was the biggest challenge for you directing the show, and is it different than it was 30 years ago?
When we wrote this to begin with, we used the liner notes from the album and I had them photocopied and I had a pair of scissors and scotch tape and a yellow legal pad and we pasted it together. I mean literally, that’s how the libretto happened. We spent a lot of time together just talking about where Pete came from and growing up and about the Who and everything else, just getting to know each other and getting to know him as a creative partner. This time it wasn’t about that. It was about trying to see Tommy in a new way. And I had two fears. One was that we wouldn’t change the production enough and the second fear was that we would change it too much and it’s been very much a balancing act.

You’ve done so many shows in different genres since the first Tommy. Do you feel like you are a different director than you were 30 years ago?
Absolutely. I think most of us calm down a little bit as we get older. Your main job as a director is storytelling, narrative, and performance, and you can’t achieve great performances if you think of your work as dictatorial. When I sit back and watch the work, I’m kind of gob-smacked at what the actors can do. You get actresses like Alison Luff, who is just brilliant, and she brings so much emotional freedom to the table, or Ali Bourzgui, who is without question a star. You can’t teach that. You can’t even direct that.