Stage

...I assume that Tommy's return to his family, the presumed sponded enthusiastically, often in anticipation of a song that embrace of normalcy, is supposed to make the musical more had been signaled by its opening notes...

...On his own show, of Rush continually referred to Spike GERALD WEALES Lee's Malcolm X as "Malcolm the Tenth," and suggested that students who wanted to cut classes to see the premiere (as Lee MEDIA had urged) should go all the way emulating the film's hero, and loot the candy counters in the theater lobbies...

...Not true mind of Tommy...

...De Niro and Barkin de- deaf, and dumb Tommy who stands catatonically while the churnliver the emotional goods and Leonardo Di Caprio, as Jack, is ing busyness goes on around him...

...It is cinematography makes the Washington state landscapes not staged by Des McAnuff and choreographer Wayne Cilento so postcard-beautiful but resonant with the spaciousness and that there is seldom a pause in the action, except for the blind, freedom that Jack so sorely desires...

...Most of them are ining back on his youth...

...outrageousness can only be sustained by the media...

...This sounds memory of it: in one ear/eye and out the other...

...Here's some of the stuff he says...

...riot...

...I often Theater Festival presented the world premiere of Stories from found it difficult to understand the lyrics, as in Paul Kandel's the Nerve Bible with words, images, and music by Laurie rendition of Uncle Ernie's "Fiddle About," but that goes with Anderson...

...The voice should have been that of an older man look- from one corner of the stage to another...

...The staging ty of the man who will someday tell this story...

...But he does UFO abduction-is-is-oh, hell...

...ions that have been known to send even mild liberals running There was a funny one which made a dance from shots of peo- for the Xanax bottle...

...If media genius is targeting, arousing, and main"Well, yeah," I said, lighting up and punching taining the precise audience you need to keep on the air, then in channel 13...

...While the show is in progress, it is difficult enough...

...I have spent decades failing to hear lyrics that young I have seen, but it was the usual electronically manipulated sounds, listeners seem to have no trouble learning, and, when they have and the words, delivered in her conversationally charming been repeated to me, that hardly seemed worth remembering...

...01' Rush...

...He becomes a pinball wizard, as the song says, and once his senses return in a mirror-breaking moment, he becomes a superstar, a cruel cult figure, and, finally, over the protests of his followers, a normal fellow-even as you and I. The book never understood viscerally what being outside the loop has been rewritten by the musical's chief composer/lyricist, Peter meant until I went to see The Who's Tommy, which had Townshend, and director McAnuff in a way that deeply offends been called simply Tommy in most of the preopening true believers from the past like Jon Pareles, who complained publicity until it occurred to the producers that there in the New York Times (April 27), "Their changes turn a blast might be people like a friend of mine who wondered if of spiritual yearning, confusion, and rebellion into a pat on the it was about English soldiers in World War I. The audience head for nesters and couch potatoes...

...Where he says bow as weapon...

...that Rodney King obviously was a threat to the four cope who beat the hell out of him...

...direction aims for the gut and lands, repeatedly...

...way, either added up to rather appealing stories or came across If I sound simply querulous in this paragraph, I apologize...

...When hurrying on foot is more than promising: he illuminates what is already complex not enough, there are the high-fly wires that let the adult in the boy's character and foreshadows the greater complexi- Tommy Peter Pan in to comfort his earlier selves...

...There seemed less music than in other Anderson shows the territory...

...tensifications of plot developments or images of the confused Good movie...

...The music, as one Ir he row of television screens across the top of the would expect, is played at very high volume, appropriately for stage at Tommy seemed familiar, and then I resongs like "I'm Free" and the somewhat extraneous "Acid called that a few days earlier I had seen a similar Queen...

...But you've been watching him for a week, now," she said...

...So I came to the like an occasion for a bitterly ironic curtain, but the music seems new musical as a relative innocent...

...The images could be seen either of videotapes where he does the same thing...

...Think of Rush Limbaugh, in his frantic quest for permanent outrage, as a Rotarian Howard Stern...

...So nostalgic a reaction appealing in a less questioning time than the 1960s...

...He's been for years now the host and the only star audition...

...This movie doesn't have the multifariousness of life...

...dience who, apparently like irresponsible and vile opinions...

...Unlike Tommy, in which the what's wrong with Sammy Kaye...

...Limbaugh Rush Limbaugh just in case you're recently back from a may or may not really believe everything he says...

...Still, the could hardly be expected by someone like me, who grew up family consists not only of the parents, who committed or conon Harry James and Larry Clinton and for whom The Who was doned a murder, but of Uncle Eddie, who sexually abused the little more than a recognizable name...

...He makes very large bucks selling copies ple coming out of rest rooms...

...again...

...He insists again and again that the capitalist system, as it stands, is full of benIT'S NOT HELL, JUST LIMBAUGH efits, joy, seashells, and balloons for the people really willing EXCELLENCE IN BOMBAST to work at it...

...Caton-Jones's within the show...

...Sort of like owning up to a pref- wonderful thing is that Brother Limbaugh, as far as I know, is erence for brandy boilermakers or the Captain and Tenille: not the first ultraconservative on the scene to understand that his quite, as the Brits say, "the done thing...

...I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the full darkness of Postman's prognosis: the last campaign seems to me to have produced 20: 4 June 1993 Commonweal...

...know, and has acknowledged, that what he says is, in its outHe's a two- or three-hundred-pound (it varies) ultraconser- rageousness, just what allows him to stay on the air and keep vative in a dark Dacron-looking suit and some of the ugliest saying it and keep making money...

...And, since the inauguration, each installment of his show begins with the legend, "America under C eleste, with connubial exasperation dripping Siege," and usually with a Monty Python-style cartoon of from every word: "You're going to watch him Clinton, Hillary, or somebody from the new administration...

...riots, it was of Rush by the effect...

...The visual high point the same stuff he says on his radio show and his videos, and of the show was a laser creation in which Anderson seemed to which is selling just fine, thank you...

...With the cat...

...He's the author of on the platoon of television sets or else on multiple screens- a book, The Way Things Ought to Be (Pocket), where he says one of them a globe-hanging overhead...

...And now he's the host and be entering a mysterious bright-light cave with only her violin star performer on his own, syndicated TV show...

...It was the technical effects, however, that not really the father from Bye, Bye Birdie, who asked in "Kids" gave the show its special quality...

...thing other than that the audience was supposed to be dazzled On "Today," the third day of the L.A...

...As usual with Laurie Anderson productions, I found who first insisted that the real cause of the riots was not the myself attracted to a work which, had it been shorn of its fas- Rodney King verdict, nor yet the urban frustration of inner Los cinating effects, reduced to what rather than how Anderson was Angeles, but those perky liberal telecopters who covered the communicating, would have seemed commonplace...

...If so, it is an odd turnwas full of aging young people who knew the music and re- ing...

...Like a radio shock-jock, he neckties ever allowed on TV, with a face uncannily like the understands that his opinions are a commodity whose adrenalater Orson Welles and the vaguely West-Texas accent of a tel- lin-content can never be allowed to drop, that every show is an evangelist...

...not to be pulled into all that light and sound, and that, after all, RICHARD ALLEVA is what theater is supposed to do...

...Tommy is the story of a young boy, the witness of a murder, THE WHAT, THE HOW, THE WHO who, exhorted to silence by his parents, becomes deaf, dumb, 'TOMMY' & 'STORIES' and blind...

...That wise man, Neil Postman, wrote in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that one of the most deleterious effects of TV culture was the transformation of political discourse into showbiz...

...The wonderful thing about Limbaugh, though, is not that he "Okay, look," I said, taking a long drag and deciding to come expresses irresponsible and often vile opinions for an eager auclean, "I can't help it: I get a kick out of Rush Limbaugh...

...For us outsiders, its acceptance depends on the way it works before making it gradually mount to violence...

...I did see the gaudy film helpless Tommy, and Cousin Kevin, who tortured the boy with Ken Russell made of the rock opera in 1975, but I have no clear and without the help of his fellow teen-age thugs...

...has been done in America since the electromagnetic media were Well, it is the kind of thing you only admit to your wife and/or born: who can forget Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy...

...If Tommy's music is not my images were plot-based, Anderson's images, except when they music, I suspect that it is also not the music of the rap genera- spelled out the words she had just spoken, were social/politiCommonweal 4 June 1993: 19 cal comments (a burning house that turned into a burning book, performer on a radio show where he happily expresses opinthe Desert Storm bomb strikes) or sometimes comic routines...

...I am as poetic platitudes...

...It is a lapel-grabbing show that commands attention and has been nominated for eleven Tony Awards...

...1 said I'd write about him...

...But it was a is a wonder of high-tech graphics-projections, videos, spemistake to have Di Caprio read the narration on the sound- cial effects-that keep the eye darting from screen to screen, track...

...that nothing is really wrong, except for the liberals...

...When everything becomes "entertainment," Postman argues, even presidential campaigns are emptied of their fundamental seriousness: and this, mind you, three years before George Bush made Willie Horton his running mate and seven years before Ross Perot and Razorback Bill Clinton made campaigning an extended talk-show...

...That "Mph," she mphed, leaving the den...

...this is the man...

...But even songs like "See Me, Feel Me," which seems row across the bottom of the stage at the Annenberg to me both musically and lyrically sentimental, and the uplift- Center in Philadelphia when the American Music ing "Welcome" assault rather than tickle the ear drums...

...A "true story...

...I have no idea what it meant if it meant any- the same stuff...

...The your best friend, nicht wahr...

...It was only as I left the theater, my ears and eyes settling down, that I began to wonder STAGE what all this flamboyance was in aid of...

...David Watkin's The production as a whole pushes as the music does...

...That is where the book comes in...

...to be saying that now everything is hunky-dory...

...Good horror movie...