Chapter 10. Tommy
Looking back now, 'Tommy' seems such a perfect and logical choice for Genesis, I'm amazed it took us so long to come round to doing it. As a company set up to stage rock musicals it had our name all over it. I can't recall now the process by which we arrived at the decision to do it – I have a hazy recollection of Chaz Coghill, a mainstay guitarist with Genesis practically throughout, being a real enthusiast for The Who in general and for Pete Townshend in particular, so maybe he suggested it initially? Chris mentions in his entry that Norman Partington had a link to Pete Townshend that he used to get us the permission, and I don't remember this either. But I'm intrigued. How did Norman come to know The Who? I seem to recall that he put on bands when he was a student at Liverpool University, so maybe it was through that...? I shall have to ask him.
I knew the music of course, and I had seen Ken Russell's sprawling, wildly exuberant, madly over-the-top but hugely enjoyable film version, with Oliver Reed – more wheels within wheels – memorably chewing the scenery as Tommy's step-dad. But as I contemplated staging it, I was at first at something of a loss. Chris refers to the hesitancy in the early stages of rehearsal from a musical perspective, and I felt equally uncertain about it dramatically. First of all, it has no script, by which I mean no dialogue. What you have is the collection of songs that tell of the meteoric rise of Tommy, the “deaf, dumb and blind kid” to a national hero and superstar as the new Pinball Wizard. But more than that, as his fame spreads, so his role takes on a curiously messianic quality, with his followers' worship of him assuming cult status. He is cynically exploited by his parents, who see him as little more than a cash cow, and at the end he appears to throw of the yoke of their oppression and emerge truly and finally at last as his own self.
But it is a ramshackled affair with a whole range of disjointed set-pieces that are brilliant in themselves – Cousin Kevin, the Acid Queen - but have little overall cohesion. In the end we tried to evoke a real sense of time and place. Beginning with VE celebrations at the end of World War II, where Tommy is born, but whose father is a fallen RAF pilot, we then move through into the 1950's and a typical Butlin's Holiday Camp, where Tommy's mother meets the Oliver Reed character (a redcoat), and the two of them fall in love, or more accurately, lust. And so the backdrop to the early part of the story is that of Austerity Britain, very parochial, rather complacent, until suddenly the 60's explode onto the scene, ripe with new fashions and possibilities. Tommy emerges as this unlikely superhero by overturning all expectations against the odds, having endured a nightmarish, abusive childhood and adolescence, representing as he does a kind of everyman: by preserving his child-like innocence in the face of appalling treatment, he encourages us to throw off the chains of our upbringing and our past and learn, like him, to experience the world afresh – to “see, hear, feel and touch” in a new, untainted way.
Quite preposterous, of course, but the idealism that lies behind it is very much a reflection of the 60's zeitgeist, while its move towards a darker, more ambivalent manifesto at the end equally reflects the growing uncertainty and disillusion that so typified the 70's. I thought it best, then to hint at all this merely, to suggest these undercurrents, but to play the whole piece at a breakneck speed, moving from one episode to the next with such pace that the audience (I hoped) would be swept along by its sheer bravura, just as people are caught up and swept along by the euphoria and hysteria surrounding Tommy's sudden unexpected rise and rise.
And it worked. The cast and musicians were fantastic, performing with a real sense of verve and panache, with the now trademark Genesis commitment to passionate, unselfish ensemble playing, with several stand-out individual performances: Allan Taylor, new to Genesis, was a wonderfully seedy stepfather; Alison Davis showed once again what a range as an actress she was developing into (in addition to always being such a fabulous singer) bringing genuine complexity and depth to the role of Tommy's mother; Chris Hawley was a truly outrageous “wicked Uncle Ernie”; John Wild*, another Genesis newcomer, was compellingly charismatic as Cousin Kevin; Juliet Braithwaite was a sultry, frightening Acid Queen – in my opinion surpassing Tina Turner in Ken Russell's film; and then there was Nicky Baird as Tommy.
(*Shortly after 'Tommy' John went into full time actor training and later appeared as Laurie Lee on a BBC adaptation of Lee's sequel to 'Cider With Rosie', the Spanish Civil War setting for 'As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning').
Nicky was an intermittent member of Genesis. His was a prodigious, but a wayward talent. I first got to know Nicky in 1974 when he played the central role of Kipps in 'Half A Sixpence' which I directed for PADOS, and in which he was superb. There was nothing Nicky could not do at that time – he was a fine singer with a strong voice, his acting had a freshness and lightness of touch, he was an extremely skilled dancer (very much in the Gene Kelly mould, being both graceful and athletic), and he was as good as Kipps as it is possible to be. He then joined Metropolitan to play Berger in 'Hair', in which his charisma and magnetism on stage was utterly compelling. He was as different from Kipps as chalk from cheese, to the point where you would have found it hard to equate him as the same person playing both roles. With Berger he added a real edge and maturity to his performance skills and, with the flimsiest of material to work with, really suggested an inner life and a world outside of what the audience saw on stage, thereby giving his performance extraordinary depth and honesty that made the ending of 'Hair', when the commune breaks up, a genuine pathos as he realises the dreams they all had are not going to be realised. But after that he disappeared for a while, and this was the pattern with Nicky. He lived life very much on the edge and you would go months, sometimes years without seeing or hearing from him, not knowing where he was or what he was doing, and then suddenly he would turn up as though he had only just stepped out of the room a few minutes before. And so it was, as if by osmosis, he turned up again just as we were about to start rehearsing: he was tailor-made for the role of Tommy. But he was also seriously overweight, and so he embarked upon a punishing routine of exercise and diet, as well as rehearsing as if his life depended on it, and quickly shed the pounds and threw himself into making sense out of the whole journey that Tommy undertakes in a way that not even Roger Daltrey achieved with such clarity.
Once again we were selected to appear at the 1978 Summer Festival at The Royal Exchange and, following the success of 'Demolition Man', we were invited to open the festival. We were also aware that 'Tommy' was an altogether much bigger beast of a show than 'Demolition Man' had been, and we needed to test it out before we reached The Exchange. We also wanted to ensure that if we were to do all the work necessary in adapting the piece for the stage, we would perform it more than just the once. Accordingly we hired The Grange Arts Centre* in Oldham, which was a flexible theatre space that could be configured end-on, in-the-round, or with the audience on three sides (which is the form we elected to present the first performances of 'Tommy' in).
(*I don't know how we came to hear about this venue but it turned out to be perfect for Genesis at this time, not just because of its flexibility, but it was technically well set up, with a great team there led by Alan Stephenson, there was a young audience regularly frequenting events there, as well as a thriving alternative arts scene in Oldham. We were made to feel extremely welcome, and although this relationship soured later during 'Stag' (described earlier) we presented our next three productions there. It was also through our going to Grange that we came into contact with Chris Shepherd, whose impact on Genesis has also been described earlier).
We presented 'Tommy' there with the audience on three sides, with the 4th side being taken up by a large screen, onto which we projected scores of images that we used to propel each episode and evoke the different times and places that the story moved through, in order to give audiences additional narrative cohesion, while beneath the screen were housed the band. We knew though that we would have to change this at The Exchange where we would have two screens so that audiences wherever they sat could follow the action clearly. Co-ordinating and overseeing all of the visual images was our close friend Andy Parkinson – this was (I think) about 6 months before Andy began working with Mike Mansfield – and it was great to be working with him again, after earlier collaborations on 'The Tall Tree', 'Half A Sixpence' (and also 'Macbeth' at The Garrick). Genesis was very much a cross-art form, multi-disciplinary performance company, and we had used film and slides in the original 'Hair', and we would have done with 'War of the Worlds' in 1980 had that production seen the light of day (see later), but it was with 'Tommy' they really came into their own.
It was a great success at The Grange where we received the most ecstatic of reviews from Chris Shepherd in his capacity as theatre critic for the Oldham Evening Chronicle (a copy of which must surely feature somewhere on this site). We then performed the piece at Altrincham Garrick as part of another festival, which was a mistake. We should not have performed it there, for we had to completely re-stage it for an end-on proscenium setting, which it simply wasn't suited to, and it just didn't fit. (I think we only agreed to perform there out of a sense of loyalty to The Garrick – where I was still Resident Director – and because they had been so supportive on Genesis at our inception). Everything was squashed and cramped and it looked awkward at times, though the cast and the band coped magnificently in the circumstances, and the audiences loved it. Chris has catalogued in great detail the various calamities of this one night on his entry – so please refer to that to read the whole story – but the principal, near-catastrophic event was the explosion of one of the pyrotechnics far too close to Alison, badly burning her arm, causing her to be rushed off to hospital in the middle of the performance, which somehow we managed to cover thanks to the ingenuity, team work and commitment once again of everyone involved.
Fortunately Ali recovered quickly and we continued our final preparations for the performance at The Exchange, which had always been our ultimate goal. As mentioned above, we had been invited this year to open the festival, and this honour was made even greater when we learned that The Exchange's Artistic Director, Michael Elliott* himself, would introduce us.
(*Among the many productions mounted by Elliott, perhaps his most famous is the seminal interpretation he directed for Granada TV of 'King Lear', with a star-studded cast that featured Olivier as Lear, Robert Lindsay as Edmund, David Threlfall as Edgar and Diana Rigg as Regan among others).
So as Michael Elliott departed from the space and the lights went down for the start, there was a genuine buzz of anticipation and excitement that coursed through the auditorium, which was completely sold out. (In fact, they could have sold the performance twice over, with hundreds of disappointed members of the public turned away). From the moment that Juliet lured Nicky into her glitter-ball-wicker dome as the Acid Queen, which then spiralled up into the roof of the theatre, the audience was on its feet. The atmosphere ratcheted up a further notch during Steve Hodgkinson's no-holds-barred rendition of Pinball Wizard when John Wild roared across the stage on a motor bike and, in one of (for me) the show's most effective highlights, when dancers in a complete blackout delivered a complex routine with torches (simulating the experience of the pinball from the inside of Tommy's head, and cleverly choreographed by Lynda in what was to be her swansong with Genesis), the audience started to cheer. In the second half this was further sustained by Louis Grant's pulsating performance of Sally Simpson, when once again the audience were on their feet, only this time that is where a large number of them stayed from there right on till the end of the show.
I was high up in the control booth in the roof of the theatre, looking down on all of this as I called through all the the various technical cues for the show. Sitting next to me was John Wild's girl friend – Maureen – our brilliantly calm, clear headed and highly organised stage manager, who was also operating the lighting cues. On the other side of me was Nigel, another of Genesis's unsung heroes, who designed the lighting for every show we did after the first version of 'Hair', who, after the problems at Altrincham Garrick, was supervising all of the pyrotechnics. As we approached the show's final climax, when Tommy has finally thrown off the corrupt influences of his step father and is duly hailed by his followers, he is lifted up on high by a group of them, almost like a religious icon, and the music reaches a thunderous finale. At that moment a whole battery of fireworks and explosives were cued to ignite. Just before I gave the cue, just before Nigel pressed the switch, the three of us looked at one another, aware of the power beneath our fingers, knowing exactly what the reaction would be, and we were not wrong. As the pyrotechnics were unleashed, the audience soared to their feet with them, yelling and cheering and roaring with excitement and approval. It was electrifying and without doubt was the single highlight moment for me of all of Genesis. In fact, I would go further and say that 'Tommy' was the zenith of our achievements. Afterwards, Natalie Anglesey (theatre critic of the Manchester Evening News, The Guardian and BBC Radio Manchester, and curator of the Royal Exchange Summer Festival), declared it was the greatest show she had ever seen.
But even this triumph was not without its disaster! Amanda, for whom this had already been a most eventful day, having graduated with her Teachers Degree in the morning, fell off the scaffolding during one of the early numbers, badly damaging her foot. In great pain she amazingly carried on, I being unaware of what had happened until the end. We rushed off to casualty immediately after the show, where the X-ray revealed she had broken her big toe, and we returned to The Exchange just in time to meet everyone as they finished the get-out, with Amanda's leg now plastered up to her knee, so that Chris Hawley and Mike Shaft had to carry her up the Exchange steps.
'Tommy' was also to be the last occasion that we worked with Nicky Baird. He disappeared again shortly afterwards and, despite many efforts to try and trace him over the following years, he seemed to step right off the map. Occasionally we heard rumours that he was living rough, or on the streets, in Salford, in London, but I never saw him again, and about ten years ago we learned that he had been found dead. An awful end to a phenomenal talent...
While we were working on 'Tommy', we had been under the impression that we were presenting its stage premiere, but then we learned that another group (in Essex, I seem to recall) beat us to it by three weeks, and that Pete Townshend naturally went to that production, which subsequently went on to transfer to London for a brief professional run there. One of the various “near-misses” that Chris has captured so well in his entry. But it did not matter, for we more than exceeded our ambitions for 'Tommy' with our performances of it at The Grange and The Exchange.