Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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Author: search.filters.author.Marsten, MedhaSubject: search.filters.subject.Film

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    FROM YOU I GET THE STORY: Tracking spirituality through the three iterations of The Who’s Tommy
    (2020) Marsten, Medha; Harding, James M; Theatre; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the late 1960s, Pete Townshend, lead guitarist and composer for British rock band The Who, discovered the teachings of Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba. Inspired by these teachings he wrote the concept album for the first successful rock opera: Tommy. The smashing success of this album led to its adaptation into a major Hollywood film directed by Ken Russell in 1975 and its adaptation into a Broadway musical directed by Des McAnuff in 1992. This thesis examines how each adaptation contributes to the Westernization, generalization, and sanitization of the spirituality inherent to the original concept album as well as how these adaptations reflect the conflicting objectives of their lead artists.