If you're looking for a traditional, all-American musical, Tommy is not for you. That doesn't mean it's not worth seeing- it's a musical of a different formula, resembling Mamma Mia more than Aida.

Tommy is a musical by Pete Townshend (yes, that Pete Townshend) based on a concept album by The Who in 1969 of the same name. Tommy is a young boy, rendered deaf, mute, and blind by a tragedy from his past, who rises to fame for his skill at pinball (no other way to fit "Pinball Wizard" in the score, Bwog presumes). Like Rent, this is a "rock opera," and according to Wikipedia, Townshend wants it to be a giant metaphor for...something.

Didn't see CMTS' production of A New Brain? Too bad! Bwog daily editor Alexandra Muhler wants to tell you what you missed.

A New Brain is, in a few ways, typical musical theater. The lead spends most of the show's two hours in a gown. The ballads are sincere and softly lit. In all, there are about two spoken lines in the play. And, most upsettingly, audience participation is forced at every turn.

But A New Brain is also quirkier than your average musical. The gown donned by Gordon (Ross Ramone), the frustrated songwriter at the center of the play, is a hospital gown, worn as he undergoes an improbably named "craniotomy." The moments of cast-crowd interaction toy with the standards accepted in such exchanges—first row audience members will be sung to, chastised, and sometimes even forced to sing along.

However, the mushy incoherence of bad musical theater rarely seeps into this production. Though the beginning of the second act lags a little with a string of earnest solos, the show is dominated by a crisp aesthetic.

In which Bwog contributor Michael Snyder regains faith in Broadway. Go see Spring Awakening--$25 for Columbia students!

About two months ago I discovered that I don't actually like musical theater. I found this out in a conversation with several dear friends who do, in fact, like musical theater. We were comparing favorite shows and my end of the conversation went something like this: "Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park, Company, Cabaret, Chicago, West Side Story." My friend asked me if I liked anything that hadn't been written by Sondhiem, Kander and Ebb, or Bernstein. I said that I have a soft spot for Rent. It occurred to me then that for every musical that I love (and the ones I love I really do love) there are at least four that make me want to vomit all over myself. This is not an exaggeration.

So, for me at least, there's very little new musical theater to get excited about. These days, there seems to be very little in musical theater that can be called new at all. There are the revivals, some of which are truly brilliant (John Doyle cannot be praised enough), there are the 'new' shows that emulate musicals of the 1940s, there are the bubonic plague-like Disney blockbusters (I include Wicked in this category), and there are the Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals that refuse to go away (I am convinced that, in the event of a nuclear holocaust, The Phantom of the Opera would continue to play for packed houses of cockroaches.) But new musicals—new in the way that Hair was new, new in the way that Sondheim's musicals have always been new, new in way that Rent was at its premiere—don't show up very often. The American musical as a genre seems to be going from terminal to vegetative.