"In 1984, the play gave memorable shape to a growing understanding that the underworld of sleazy small business was merely a microcosm of the bigger, more polite variety"

"It suggested the way social Darwinism lay at the root of our economic system, with its zero-sum games and dominance pyramids. There’s a reason Mitch and Murray, the owners of the agency and creators of the contest, are never seen, like golden-parachuters or two-bit Godots.... [David Mamet's] ideas have become conventional in the process of being overtaken and one-upped by reality. The whole world, many feel, is now a consortium of thugocracies, some even sanctioned by popular acclaim. In that context, two-bit players are too puny to worry about, and greed at the scale of a Cadillac unremarkable."

Writes Jesse Green, in "'Glengarry Glen Ross' Review: Caveat Emptor, Suckers!/Kieran Culkin, Bill Burr and Bob Odenkirk star in a bumpy revival of David Mamet’s play about salesmen with nothing worth selling" (NYT).

"That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with 'Tommy.'"

"When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with 'The Magic Flute.'... That’s why I find it more profitable to think about 'Tommy' not as a chain of events but as a dream you are watching from a perch inside someone’s amygdala. That person would of course be [Pete] Townshend, who... recently told The Times that 'Tommy' is probably 'a memoir in which I work out my childhood stuff.'... [H]is abuse, he said, was at the hands of his 'awful' grandmother, not his 'neglectful and careless' parents.... 'Sickness will surely take the mind/Where minds can’t usually go'....  [Townshend's] avatar... finds that 'freedom lies in normality.' This is the opposite of rock’s countercultural pose; in the end, the one to whom Tommy sings the anthem 'Listening to You' is not a crowd of admirers but his mother. [The new Broadway] production does not traffic in such subtleties.... You will be overwhelmed.... [W]hen everything’s an effect, no matter how brilliant, none can be special."

Writes Jesse Green, in "'Tommy' Goes Full Tilt in a Relentless Broadway Revival/Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?" (NYT).

Green makes his points really well. I'm just going to pick one nit — with the headline. In pinball, you don't "go full tilt." "Tilt" ends the game. The "tilt" in "go full tilt" is the tilting in jousting. You're on a horse, aiming a lance, riding quickly toward another horseman with a lance. That's the concrete thing in the dying metaphor. You may remember Janis Joplin and Full Tilt Boogie. And I concede that there was a pinball video game in the 90s called Full Tilt! Pinball. That's got nothing to do with Tommy, which is not about video games. 

But then the show, as Green tells it, is out of whack and, in overdoing everything, misses the chance to tell a story consistent with Townshend's recent revelations.

"But [Neil] Simon, who died Sunday at 91, didn’t know he was standing directly over a fault in American culture, one that even as he hit his stride started gapping and would eventually pull him down."

"Until then, he reliably provided the pleasure of exaggerated self-recognition, reflecting life but with palpable structure and better punch lines. In the theater, the shared assumptions between the playwright and his very homogeneous late-century audience — largely white and urban, often Jewish or at least Jewish-adjacent — had the redoubling effect necessary to raucous comedy.... In the late ’60s and early ’70s, as independent films were diversifying their outlook and shaking off the formulas of Hollywood storytelling, Broadway boulevard comedies like 'Last of the Red Hot Lovers' and 'California Suite' — tales of the befuddled nouveau riche in a new world — began to look mass-produced and middlebrow.... Sometimes, in the way that can happen when writers momentarily grab the tail of the zeitgeist, the laughs were even prescient.... [The plays] may be unjust to the harridans, simps and playthings he stocks them with but they tell a real story of male collapse that was relevant to the culture at the time they were first produced, and might still hold up better than the later, more 'serious' works. I think I understood that back in high school when, putting on my father’s clothes [to play a minor role in 'The Odd Couple'], I saw how poorly they fit. These kinds of men were already under siege, as everyone in 'The Odd Couple' sensed without saying so. Which somehow made the laughs even bigger."

From "Neil Simon Drew Big Laughs, Then Came a Cultural Shift" by Jesse Green (NYT).