Pete Townshend’s main rock operas – Tommy, Lifehouse and Quadrophenia – are a private legacy he continues to wrestle with, repeatedly reviving and retranslating them into new types. Quadrophenia (1973) was his try and remind The Who of their youthful Mod roots, and the music which lured him again to the band for 1996 performances of the album. After the 1979 movie fleshed out and supplanted his liner notice narrative, his spouse Rachel Fuller’s orchestral preparations for Quadrophenia Classical (2015) reconfigured the music. That recording, with further soloists changing vocals, soundtracks Quadrophenia: A Mod Ballet. The title will provoke derision from Who fundamentalists, suspicious of Townshend’s typically overreaching penchant for high-art variations of his traditional music. Working together with his blessing and light-weight contact session, although, this Sadler’s Wells manufacturing revives Quadrophenia’s fervid, youthful essence.
A prologue sees Jimmy (Paris Fitzpatrick) poised on a jutting rock over stormy back-projected waves and the equally tempestuous, crashing brass of “I Am The Sea”. 4 Mods emerge behind him to characterize his 4 psychological sides, a story factor seemingly misplaced on newcomers to Townshend’s story.
Act One then reverts to Jimmy’s London life, from workplace drone frustration to his idolatry of rock star the Godfather (Jack Widdowson), launched with “My Era”’s authentic violent guitar chords of as he rips open his Union Jack jacket. His tossing of Jimmy’s My Era album within the Stage Door gutter is the primary of a number of grim disillusions. Jimmy’s solo dance acts as a bodily soliloquy in response, inexperienced parka trailing raggedly behind him, no match for the dazzling grace of his different hero the Ace Face (Dan Baines, wanting extra like Trainspotting’s cocky blond Jonny Lee Miller than Sting).
Director Rob Ashford and choreographer Paul Roberts ignore the cinema interpretation of the album’s story in these London scenes. Townshend’s concern together with his dad and mom’ war-traumatised technology and their impression on his personal is movingly dramatised in Jimmy’s dad and mom’ suburban house life. Mom (Kate Tydman) rouses from depressed couch slumber to interact Father (Stuart Neal) in a determined, half-violent erotic dance to “Love Reign O’er Me”, earlier than slumping again to Valium and TV as Jimmy enters, unaware of their roiling interior lives. Inter-generational anger simmers when he joins his dad in deadening manufacturing facility work, defined by a flashback to Father surviving his buddies’ wartime bloodbath on one other coastal rock, the rating dropping to listen to their final gasps. A Soho café sanctuary and the exhilaration of Jimmy and the coveted Mod Lady’s rock membership dance to “Can’t Clarify”, pushing themselves to the restrict as Yazz Ahmed’s Milesian trumpet provides the track a brand new, hip twist, counter these inherited horrors.
Act Two sends Jimmy to Brighton, the place day-tripping Mods terrify packed commuter carriages to “5.15”, and he floats skyward amid swirling visions of drugs and dream ladies. An exhilarating Mods and Rockers battle royal contrasts with Jimmy’s seaside reunion together with his household, a tantalising second of blissful unity together with his childhood self. All of it leads again to that jutting rock, although, the place the disaster which despatched Phil Daniels’ Jimmy’s scooter hurtling over a cliff is reached. The ocean churns beneath cosmic black sky, and Fitzpatrick’s performing matches his dancing as Jimmy shudders by means of his darkish night time of the teenage soul, lastly attaining shattered transcendence as “Love Reign O’er Me” hits Gotterdammerung orchestral heights more durable than any energy chord. Alongside the younger solid’s exuberant dancing and brightly colored Paul Smith trend, this ending’s hard-won optimism ought to communicate to any new, younger audiences who could also be lured to Sadler’s Wells, giving The Who a recent technology of followers.
