Hal Willner reinvents the Who’s Tommy for Adelaide Festival

ONE of rock ’n’ roll’s most enduring and versatile musical creations will get a rebirth in Adelaide tomorrow.

Hal Willner

DEAF, dumb and blind he might be, but that hasn’t stopped Tommy from being one of rock ’n’ roll’s most enduring and versatile musical creations. The famous 1969 concept album by the Who, penned largely by guitarist Pete Townshend, has enjoyed cinematic, theatrical and orchestral success since the album’s release and in Adelaide tomorrow the quintessential rock opera will be reborn once more.

The Adelaide Festival world premiere of this new Tommy, created with Townshend’s blessing by American musician and composer Eric Mingus and legendary producer Hal Willner, sees the double album reinvented by a host of performers that includes the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster and Australian siblings Yael and Elana Stone, alongside Ireland’s Gavin Friday and Camille O’Sullivan, US guitarist Giancarlo Vulcano and his compatriot Harper Simon, Paul Simon’s son.

The production is another example of producer Willner’s penchant for innovative festival projects. He’s the man responsible for the Leonard Cohen tribute Came So Far for Beauty in 2005, Lou Reed’s Berlin in 2007 and Rogue’s Gallery in 2010, all of those staged under the Sydney Festival umbrella. Now a long association with Adelaide Festival artistic director David Sefton has led to this latest musical makeover having its debut in Australia.

“This is a project that Eric has had in mind for a long time,” Willner says during rehearsals for the show. “It’s so great that it is being realised. We’re not the Who. We’re looking at this differently. We’re seeing this through Eric’s vision; then it is reinterpreted again by the artists. It will be very different to the way people are used to hearing it, but it is very loving towards the material.”

Mingus, son of legendary jazz musician Charles Mingus, floated an idea to his friend Townshend several years ago about taking Pinball Wizard, See Me Feel Me, I’m Free and many other songs from Tommy and giving them new life. Townshend liked the idea.

In Adelaide the songs are in the hands of an ensemble one wouldn’t identify immediately as a perfect fit for the material, but that is the whole point, as Willner proved so successfully with Came So Far for Beauty, in which Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Rufus Wainwright and Antony Hegarty, among others, transformed the Cohen canon. It’s an opportunity, Willner says, for artists to work outside their comfort zone.

“We create a happening,” he says, “with a bunch of people that you would normally never see in a room together. With these kinds of projects it’s liberating for them. It’s not their music. It gives them a certain kind of freedom that they don’t have with their own work. They can become Edith Piaf for a while and have some fun.”

One wouldn’t put Forster in the Piaf basket, perhaps, but the Brisbane songwriter and writer will be in fresh terrain playing the character of Tommy’s father in the production.

“For Robert, maybe it will inspire some new collaborations with some of the people he has met, and the other way around,” Willner says. “Just hearing him at rehearsal the other day, he does sound so good. His presence is interesting among jazz and rock people.”

Tommy, the album, was a game-changer for the Who, until that point a rock band whose catalogue included a rash of era-defining singles such as My Generation and I Can See for Miles. The story of a deaf, dumb and blind kid and how he is transformed through the power of music was a bold step by Townshend that took rock music into unfamiliar terrain, giving it a theatrical, operatic scale, a grand vision that would see many more so-called rock operas follow in its wake.

Willner, a schoolboy at the time of Tommy’s creation, can remember being switched on to it immediately.

“I was 13 or 14 when it came out,” he says. “I knew the Who before that, through My Generation and Magic Bus, but I still remember hearing Tommy for the first time. It was my first experience with a libretto and it was amazing.

“I didn’t have the record myself so I went over to my friend’s to listen to it all the time. I have a fond feeling for the record.”

The title role in this production has fallen to a woman, Yael Stone, an Aussie based in New York who is one of the stars of the television series Orange is the New Black. She landed the job after Willner saw her in the show and asked one of his friends in the cast about her ­potential.

“Her character is this sweet, innocent psycho,” he says. “I asked my friend about her. Can she sing? She’s from Australia? So this was just right and she was into it. It’s great when something falls into place like that.”

Willner is hopeful that this production will move on to other destinations, although so far Adelaide is its only outing.

Not that the producer doesn’t have other fish to fry. After tomorrow’s opening night Willner flies back to New York to resume one of his regular gigs, as a music supervisor on the television comedy institution Saturday Night Live. He has been involved with the show on and off since 1981 and was involved in its recent 40th anniversary show.

“That was amazing,” he says. “There were people I hadn’t seen for more than 20 years. It’s been a great opportunity to watch generations of new writers and talents coming through.”

His recent resume includes The Old Woman, a theatre collaboration with director Robert Wilson, as well as a new work based on the life of ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinski for which he wrote the music, and some performances reading Allen Ginsberg on stage with accompaniment from Philip Glass and Bill Frisell. Willner is not a man to rest on his laurels or to restrict himself creatively.

“I trudge the road of whatever,” he says modestly. “Let’s see what’s next. I’m very fortunate I can do this.”

Before the next thing, however, he has opening night in Adelaide to enjoy. The beauty of any project, he says, is in seeing the original work brought to new life by the artists.

“It depends on how much rehearsals we’ve had,” he says, “but always the most exciting moment for me is watching something take on a new life; when something is just working. With Came So Far for Beauty it was going out and seeing someone like Antony where no one had ever seen or heard of him … going out there and just looking at the audience. And seeing things work that you are never going to see again. It’s about those moments.”

And he’s confident that there will be a few of those moments to savour this time.

“From rehearsals so far it’s a beautiful thing,” he says. “I couldn’t have expected more. It’s its own animal. It’s a piece of work that went in odd directions in Hollywood films and Broadway shows. It has taken on this entirely new life.”

Tommy opens at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide, tomorrow and runs until Sunday.