Ramps On The Moon present a radical new take on The Who's Tommy.

It's over 40 years since the ‘deaf, dumb and blind kid’ of The Who's Pinball Wizard made his stage debut in the musical he inspired. But a new production of Tommy will mark the first time the character has been played by a disabled actor.

Leading man William Grint is not alone. Conceived as an ambitious project to fundamentally change the ways in which both audiences and performers with disabilities are regarded in mainstream theatre, the scheme behind the musical, national theatre consortium Ramps On The Moon, produces shows with truly diverse casts, fully integrating elements like BSL and captioning in new and inventive ways.

Among the member venues of this partnership is the Birmingham REP, which hosts the show this month as part of a wider national tour. We found out more from the show's director, Kerry Michael, Artistic Director of Theatre Royal Stratford East.

“Ramps On The Moon is a consortium of six regional theatres who’ve come together to try to change the landscape with regard to inclusion in the mainstream,” he explains. “One strand of this is audience - so typically on Tuesday nights we'd have the signed performance of a show, and on Wednesdays there'd be a captioned performance, but in this case, whenever you come to see it, it will be fully accessible. The other part is putting people with disabilities at the heart of the work, so it's also about casting and profile.”

The operative word here is ‘mainstream’. Inspired by the success of Graeae Theatre's The Threepenny Opera in 2014, the first production to come out of this groundbreaking collaboration was The Government Inspector, directed by Roxana Silbert and staged at Birmingham REP in March last year. As people lucky enough to have seen it will recall, it was one of those rare and thrilling instances where a production feels genuinely unlike anything that has gone before. By highlighting rather than hiding elements like captioning and signing, it cleverly transformed them from necessary concessions into assets - tools to be used for the entertainment of the whole audience rather than only those who needed them - opening eyes to a wealth of previously untapped resources. It's a tough act for Tommy to follow, but so far things sound promising.

“I've worked with actors with various impairments in other productions,” says Michael, “and we co-produced Reasons To Be Cheerful with Graeae, but I've never done anything on this kind of scale before. What's exciting with this piece is that the BSL has created a whole other language on stage. In addition to the acting, singing, dancing and music, as a director, I've got a new layer of subtext to exploit.

It's not the best reflection of the industry that inclusivity is still the exception rather than the norm, but it's nonetheless exciting to be witnessing the beginnings of really radical structural change, where mixed-ability casts are not just playing small-scale shows to certain self-selecting audiences, but are rewriting the rules of large-scale comedies and musicals with wide appeal.

“There are a number of reasons why we chose Tommy. Firstly, it's got a cracking rock album score which is really entertaining. Second, there's a character who has perceived disabilities at the heart of it, and with an inclusive cast, you can explore the storytelling and the politics in a way that’s really exciting, with a group of disabled and non-disabled actors taking ownership of the language. And then there's the fact that it's set in the ’60s, so you've got the whole aspect of looking at the period and how perceptions around disability have or haven't changed since then.”

This retrospective view of the story is embedded in the structure of Michael's production, with a brand new sequence set in 2017 showing Tommy looking back over his life. The additional scene contains one of two new songs written specifically for the production by The Who's Pete Townshend, the other being a kind of reprise of the Acid Queen number featured in Act One. In the original production, Tommy meets the Acid Queen - a prostitute and drug dealer otherwise known as The Gypsy - during a visit to the Isle of Dogs. This revamped version not only sees the character played as a drag queen by Peter Straker, but also has her return in the second act, giving her a journey of her own and allowing audiences to find out what became of her.

“(Pete) has been very supportive. We've been talking to him regularly. We've had meetings with him and he's seen various drafts of what we've been doing, so in that sense he's been very engaged. He hasn't seen the show yet because he's got his own show on - literally the same day we had our first preview, he was opening The Who's unplugged gig tour, so we're on the road at the same time. I'm hoping that he'll get to see it at some point during the tour, but I think he's off in Vegas at the moment. It's a tough life, being a rock star!”

The production emerges at a time when stage musicals based around pre-existing songs by rock or pop bands seem more popular than ever. But there are key differences between a show like Tommy and the current roster of jukebox musicals ranging from Mamma Mia! to Thriller Live.

“Back in the ’60s and ’70s there were a number of shows based on concept albums like Tommy and Jesus Christ Superstar, where each song was already designed to progress a story on. That's very different from a jukebox musical, where you take someone's back catalogue and try to shoehorn the songs into a story as an afterthought.

“But I think all of these things are popular because we love the recognition of songs we know and can sing along to. With Tommy, it's talking to a generation of people who remember hearing the songs for the first time when they were young and rebellious. Seeing that audience reliving those memories 40 years on is really fun and makes for a great night out.”

In his capacity as Artistic Director at Stratford East, musicals are currently a particular focus for Michael, who’s recently launched a scheme called the New Musical Development Collective to help generate challenging and innovative musical theatre projects.

“Musical theatre is something that we're very passionate about, and I think having new voices in musical theatre is really important. Music has a visceral connection with audiences and is a really good tool for connecting with communities. Musicals also tend to be more cross-generational, so you have the experience of sharing shows as a family.”

For Michael, who’s stepping down from his position at the end of 2017 after taking the theatre from strength to strength over the last 12 years, Tommy looks set to be one of many ways he'll be heading out with a bang.

“(Tommy has) been the most positive experience I've had as a director for a long time. Has it been a challenge? Yes, to a degree, but it's also been a really joyous process.”

The Who's Tommy shows at Birmingham Repertory Theatre from Wednesday 17 to Saturday 27 May.

By Heather Kincaid