Saturday Entertainment

This week, it's been this song that's been playing in my head:



Why, you might ask, would a life-long secularist like me be enchanted with this song? First, let's deal with this choice of video.

If playing a bad rendition of a song would have gotten that song out of my head, this would have done it. Unfortunately, just putting up a video that has no visuals in it doesn't make much sense to me. So you get the movie version. The original version is much better, though.

As for what I love about this song, to me, it's not about the question of whether Tommy will be "saved" in any religious sense of the word. The song is about his family's concerns for Tommy's future. He needs to be saved in a very real sense - from the isolation he's built up around himself. Being able to understand religious ideas, and either accepting or rejecting them, is something he can't do. So is everything else he should be experiencing and learning. This concern is one thing that the movie's version of the song gets across, particularly his parents' growing despair over his condition.

I recently saw the Burien Little Theatre (BLT) production of The Who's Tommy, which is one of the shows I mentioned a few weeks ago. Since I work in theatre in this area, I don't feel right about saying much regarding either this or the Centerstage version that will be appearing in early May. I will say, though, that I think the BLT version renders this song better than anything I've heard. It's meant to be a choral number, and they perform it that way. The show's director made a smart choice to not try to recreate the movie's scene, for any one of a number of reasons, but I think it works at least as well at portraying the situation as the movie does.

As someone who is both a fan of The Who and of theatre, I think the BLT version is worth checking out if you live in the Seattle-Tacoma area. (see NOTE 1) As I watched the show, there were songs that I enjoyed more the way The Who did them, and one or two where I liked the movie version better. But it's still a great show, and I don't think any aging rock and roll fans will be disappointed. If you miss it, though, Centerstage will be doing it as well. Check those links for showtimes and other relevant information.

NOTE 1: The Who's Tommy is playing this weekend and next at Burien Little Theatre. Check BLT's site for showtimes, ticket information, and directions.

UPDATE/CORRECTION: Changed the sentence about when Centerstage's version of The Who's Tommy begins its run. Originally, I'd said it was April.

Saturday Entertainment: The Who's Tommy

This song has been going through my head lately:

(see UPDATE below)

It's the British rock group The Who performing "Overture" from the rock opera Tommy. It's actually not a particularly good performance (this one sounds better, for instance - Pete Townsend's guitar playing is almost letter-perfect), but it's a good look at what a Who concert was like back then. It's from the 1970s, when The Who were hip, young, and, well, breathing. I think Keith Moon was gone five years after this concert. John Entwistle lasted much longer, but he's gone now, too.

In fact, Tommy is so old, it's now a musical, and two amateur theatres in the Puget Sound region will be putting it on in the next few months.

What has always amazed me about The Who's live performances of Tommy is that it was usually just the four of them playing and singing. If the theatres showing The Who's Tommy in our area follow the usual practice, they'll be performing in similar numbers. If they play this well, I'd say they'll be doing as much as can be expected of them.

Tommy is a story about personal enlightenment and the way that organized religions can sometimes get in the way of that process. In perhaps the most revealing lines in the song "I'm Free", once Tommy is finally freed of his handicaps, he says:

If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high,
You'd laugh and say nothing's that simple.
But you've been shown many times before,
Messiahs pointed to the door,
and no one had the guts to leave the temple.

Life, he was saying, is best understood by living it, not trying to find out what the rules were for happiness or enlightenment. As his own following grows, Tommy forgets this, and eventually his followers go elsewhere looking for "enlightenment".

Burien Little Theatre be showing it February 17 through March 25.

Centerstage, in Federal Way, will pick up the silver ball, and show their own production of it May 4 through May 27.

Check those links for showtimes and possible schedule changes.

If you live in this region, and you don't see it, you just aren't trying very hard. Treat yourself to one of the best works of popular music to come out of the 1960s.

UPDATE: I think from now on, when this message appears in a post I do about a show that was over forty years ago, I will just leave that graphic up with no link to the greedy asshats who think that they should make more money from something that was made by people who are now dead, and thus cost them next to nothing to put on the Internet. Whoever WMG is, they can kiss my furry butt.

Not The Bad Idea It Might Seem

[According to Wikipedia, this is the Trinity explosion 0.016 seconds after ignition. Image credit Los Alamos National Laboratory (via Wikipedia).]

I got a chuckle out of this article by Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

There are certain characters in science who stand out for their larger-than-science characteristics: Galileo and his conflicts with Papal authorities; Albert Einstein and his political dabblings and pacifist overtures; Richard Feynman and his safecracking, storytelling antics; Stephen Hawking and his ethereal brain trapped in a frozen body. Biographies, documentaries, films, and even plays have attempted to capture the essence of these giants (see QED, for example, the play starring Alan Alda as Feynman). But to my knowledge, none have had an opera produced in their likeness.

Enter Doctor Atomic, a look at the meaning behind the making of the atomic bomb from the perspective of its paterfamilias J. Robert Oppenheimer and his disparate struggles: with nature to reveal her secrets, with his conscious to ease his guilt. He also struggles with General Leslie R. Groves, the titular military head of the Manhattan Project, and with fellow physicist and future father of the H-Bomb, Edward Teller.

Oppenheimer the Opera: A review of Doctor Atomic

That's right, someone made an opera out of a bunch of scientists and engineers building a highly explosive technological gizmo out in the desert. As daft as this idea sounds, apparently it turned out to be a good one:

If you’ve not experienced an opera in modern English, it takes some getting used to. Mundane conversations take on significance when set in a foreign language, but lose that here. The gravitas of this opera, however, is in the haunting music, the dramatic sets, and especially in the subject matter itself, for seemingly commonplace dialogue is rapidly elevated when the topic is whether uranium or plutonium will kill the most people. The libretto, in fact, was pieced together from numerous historical sources, including Edward Teller’s Memoirs, historian Ferenc Szasz’s The Day the Sun Rose Twice, Robert Norris’s Racing for the Bomb, and others. When Doctor Atomic lets us in on conversations that the Los Alamos scientists had about the possibility that the test shot might set the atmosphere on fire, and gambled on the TNT equivalency of the bomb, we are listening in on history itself.

Oppenheimer the Opera: A review of Doctor Atomic

You have to admit, it's a story with some drama all right. They were literally talking about, and betting on, end of the world stuff out there at Los Alamos. I'm glad no one offered me a bet on whether an opera about it would flop or not, though. I would have bet wrong.

Oppenheimer is one of the great personal stories of our time. He was a brilliant physicist, of course. He was troubled by the implications of the weapon he was developing, but as an ethnic Jew whose parents immigrated from Germany, he had reason to hope that the Allies would develop an A-bomb before the Nazis did. After the war was over, he refused to support further research into atomic weaponry:

After the war, Oppenheimer was appointed Chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), serving from 1947 to 1952. It was in this role that he voiced strong opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. In 1953, at the height of U.S. anticommunist feeling, Oppenheimer was accused of having communist sympathies, and his security clearance was taken away. The scientific community, with few exceptions, was deeply shocked by the decision of the AEC. In 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson attempted to redress these injustices by honoring Oppenheimer with the Atomic Energy Commission's prestigious Enrico Fermi Award.

J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 - 1967)

Oppenheimer didn't limit his intellectual pursuits to physics and nuclear engineering. He learned Sanskrit, I read long ago, simply for the sake of learning the language. It was he who quoted the Bhagavad Gita at the Trinity test:

Recalling the scene, Oppenheimer said: "A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. There floated through my mind a line from the "Bhagavad-Gita" in which Krishna is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty: "I am become death: the destroyer of worlds."

American Experience: Race For The Superbomb

He died at a relatively young age. It's hard to know whether the pressures of building the bomb, his guilt over his role in that effort, or his subsequent persecution contributed to his early death. They certainly could have. In any event, I suppose if there were an American scientist about whom an opera could be written, it would be he.

UPDATE (Nov. 23): Dana Hunter has linked to a couple of YouTube videos from Doctor Atomic in this article.