ROCK OPERA REVIEWS : Catharsis in the Theater of Rock

Theater is being there. It was exciting to celebrate the 20th anniversary of “Tommy” with the Who at the Universal Amphitheatre Thursday night--as much for the audience as for the show.

I know: It is the normal state of affairs at a rock concert that the crowd seethes and bubbles and never sits down for long. Either people are on their feet cheering--for Roger Daltrey, whipping his mike in circles like a bolo; for Patti LaBelle, sashaying around as the Acid Queen--or they’re on their way up the aisle for a beer.

Distracting? No, it’s part of the fun. It’s also a tribute to the holding power of the show, which will still be going on when you get back with your beer. And you will return, if it’s any good.

Compare the average theater audience, sitting in their seats like good little children waiting to be instructed or, even worse, the average symphony audience, terrified to applaud at the wrong time.

Somehow the looseness of the rock tradition, the back-and-forth between artist and audience, seems healthier. This may well have been the way Greek audiences watched their tragedies, sending a continuous feedback of emotion up to the stage, rather than saving it all up for the end of the play.

Greek theater was about catharsis, and so is the theater of rock. “Tommy” was one of the first rock operas, without which we wouldn’t have had Andrew Lloyd Webber’s shows or “Les Miserables.” But it has had few direct successors, a testament to its power and mystery.

“Listening to you, I get the music . . . Gazing at you I get the heat.” What does that mean exactly? Unknown. But the harmonic change on “heat” wrenches the gut.

As in all opera, music is its basic vehicle--big slams of music that knock you off your feet and pull you into the tide. I’d seen staged versions of “Tommy” that concentrated on the story. That wasn’t the point at the Amphitheatre. This was “Tommy” as a rite, an apotheosis. If you were new to the liturgy, you just had to follow along.

Thursday’s crowd were adepts, in spots anyway. When Elton John came out as the Pinball Wizard--a Truman Capote figure in a red suit--everybody jumped up, clenched their fists and roared the motto of his song along with him. “Sure/plays/a/mean/pin/BALL.”

Who the Pinball Wizard and the Acid Queen were, how they figured in Tommy’s story, Tommy’s story itself--these things were subsumed in the flash and roar of the performance event. It wasn’t a “Tommy” to contemplate, as can be done sitting alone at home with the Who’s recording. This was about celebration.

Master of the revels was Daltrey, not the kid he was in ’69 but still quick on his feet--a match for the evil towhead Billy Idol, who was probably in third grade in ’69. (Idol played Tommy’s rotten Cousin Kevin, with Phil Collins as Uncle Ernie, who likes to fiddle about. Maybe this isn’t as comical now as it used to be, with the new awareness of child abuse.)

Who played Tommy? Nobody, and this may be one of the sources of the piece’s mystery. Daltrey sang Tommy’s words, with occasional assists from composer Pete Townshend--but there was no attempt to embody him, and he remained as ectoplasmic as ever: the pinball Messiah rejected by his flock.

It almost means something. Meanwhile, the music is sinking in. Oddly, “Tommy” has never had a first-class Broadway-budget musical staging, on the scale of “Jesus Christ Superstar” or “Hair.” It might not be too late.