‘Tommy’ Takes Pinball to the Desert : Theater: Palm Desert is about to find out what happens when the Pinball Wizard meets the golf ball wizards at McCallum Theatre.

When the McCallum Theatre of Palm Desert’s Bob Hope Cultural Center announced that “Tommy” was coming to town, folks said, “Who?”

“This year, (the McCallum) also had ‘Tommy Tune,’ ” executive director Nancy Dolensek said this week. “So people thought that ‘Tommy Tune’ was back again.”

The Broadway hit “The Who’s Tommy,” about a “deaf, dumb and blind” pinball wizard based on the 1969 album by the British rock band the Who, is an unknown quantity in Palm Desert where one is more likely to find golf balls than pinball. This area due east of Palm Springs--an oasis of lush golf courses and tennis courts surrounding gated retirement communities and resort hotels--is hardly a haven for the rock ‘n’ roll generation devoted to rocker Pete Townshend’s creation. “This is a stretch,” Dolensek admits.

But Palm Desert will find out what happens when the golf ball wizards meet the Pinball Wizard when the road company of “Tommy” opens tonight at the McCallum. Dolensek believes her audience is up for the challenge. As of Monday, she said tickets--which range from $40 to $60--were selling at about 75% capacity for the 1,100-seat theater. The audience received its first introduction to “Tommy” on Friday in the McCallum Theatre lobby, with a “pinball wizard contest” using the giant machine from the show.

“I almost hate calling it a rock opera--it’s a misnomer,” she said. “While it is based on the music of the Who, there is a compelling and distinctive story line--it’s by no means listening to two hours of hard rock. And it’s a production dream--it’s by far the largest production we’ve ever had in here. To put it in perspective, this show travels in 13 semi-trucks. ‘Les Miz’ traveled in five.”

The Palm Desert engagement, which runs through Saturday, marks “Tommy’s” return to California. While there have been various concert and theater presentations of “Tommy”--as well as an expensive and unsuccessful 1975 film adaptation--the Broadway version cut its teeth at the La Jolla Playhouse in July, 1992, before moving on to New York, where the $7-million production opened in April, 1993, at the St. James Theatre after substantial surgery, including a re-tooling of the second act.

In May, “Tommy” will head for Costa Mesa’s Orange County Performing Arts Center, and in early June goes to the San Francisco Opera House. The show comes to the Universal Amphitheatre July 13-31. While the producers expect to have only one “Tommy” touring company in the United States, plans exist for other “Tommy” productions in Toronto, London and other European cities.

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“I’m thrilled that it’s going to be in California during the summer. . . . It’s pretty much a California product,” “Tommy” co-creator and director Des MacAnuff said. “They attempted to produce the show in London in the ‘70s, and it failed. ‘Tommy’ is very much an American creation.”

Scott Zeiger, president of Pace Theatrical Group and executive producer of the “Tommy” tour, said he expects “Tommy” to be successful with Palm Desert’s traditionally older audience, despite their unfamiliarity with rock. “Our second stop on this tour was Fort Lauderdale, and while there are certainly plenty of young people there, the traditional audience is retired,” he said. “They stood on their feet and cheered.

“It did win five Tony Awards, and has been legitimized by Broadway. The primary difference between this and any other Broadway musical is that it was written by Pete Townshend, not Andrew Lloyd Webber. It has an electric guitar and bass in the orchestra, and it’s definitely a rock music score, but it is a book musical. There is a real meaty story there.”

Zeiger said that while “Tommy” has a built-in audience of Who fans, it requires aggressive marketing because it is such a new show, going on tour just a year after its Broadway opening. “People are seeing something fresh, but by the same token, unlike ‘Phantom,’ ‘Les Miserables’ or ‘Miss Saigon,’ we haven’t been running long enough to develop a huge groundswell of interest.”

While Zeiger said a single-budget figure for the tour is hard to calculate, the show costs approximately $500,000 a week to tour, and is booked through June, 1995. Reviews have ranged from ecstatic to lukewarm; Houston Chronicle’s Everett Evans, for example, termed it “lavishly over-rated” and “emotionally empty.”

Regardless of reviews, Randy Whitescarver, stage manager of the show, said “Tommy” has played to sellout crowds across the country. “We broke an all-time box-office record in Boston,” he said. “The day after ‘Tommy’ won five Tony Awards, the Broadway production took in $494,000.”

Whitescarver said that the show has been difficult to tour because of its size and technical complexity. “A lot of road shows go out that have one or two big effects. They’ll travel with either a lot of lighting and a little scenery, or an automation deck that will move the scenery via computer instead of having stagehands pushing it.

“We have a little bit of everything. We have the automated deck; we have a tremendous amount of lighting; we have front projection, rear projection, video--still video, laser-disc video--we have pyrotechnics, we have a pinball machine that’s on hydraulics that spins and lifts and explodes. We pulled all the tricks out.”

And Zeiger said Los Angeles will see the most lavish “Tommy” of all. “L.A. will be unique unto itself,” Zeiger said. “Palm Desert will have a wonderful production, but L.A. is going to have a custom design that is going to be quite spectacular. Universal Amphitheatre is such a unique space, it’s not a traditional proscenium stage. We are spending a great deal of time building a special set design.”

* “The Who’s Tommy” will be at the McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert today through Saturday, for information call (619) 340-ARTS or (619) 278-TIXS; at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, May 10-15, (714) 740-2000; and the Universal Amphitheatre, July 13-31, (213) 480-3232.