There was even an eerie 6-7 echo. As the program excerpt from Richard Barnes’s 1979 book MODS! explained, the lowest mods on the totem pole (i.e. the poorest, which also sounds contemporary) were called “Seven and Sixers” because their t-shirts were not from Carnaby Street boutiques but, “from Woolworths and cost seven shilling and sixpence.” Is there nothing new under the sun? Or, as the Who would put it: “And the world looks just the same/And history ain’t changed.”   

I also wouldn’t have thought that the four-way split personality of the protagonist, Jimmy (Paris Fitzpatrick, superbly disturbed), was a danceable concept. I was off there too. From the opening flash-forward scene in which Jimmy hovers on a shoreline precipice, four dancers representing the fractured quartet of his mind—the Tough Guy (Curtis Angus), the Lunatic (Dylan Jones), the Romantic (Seirian Griffiths), and the Hypocrite (Yasset Roldan)—shadowed him. They emerged from the waves to mimic his movements in ripples or arrange their faces behind him like a totem pole. The effect was neat, like filmic afterimages. Later, they haunted him, popping out of the scenery. They watched his interactions with the Mod Girl (Serena McCall) at the diner and the dance hall, and they tailed him on the 5:15 train to Brighton. 

The rest of the Quadrophenia album’s drug-addled characters—the Ace Face, the Godfather, and the gang members—were surprisingly suited to the full-length ballet milieu too. Like swans, sylphs, or snowflakes, mods and rockers have their own distinct imagery and movement vocabularies. And it was genius to cast a woman dressed like a sparkly blueberry to represent the blue Dexamyl pills the teens popped in alarming quantities (Amaris Gillies danced the role of Drugs). She shimmied and seduced, conducting the gangs’ movements like a human orchestra. Whenever the teens touched her, they got tweaky—a perfect conceit for a dance. Oh, and the show’s ending was about as balletic as it gets: Jimmy made the same swan dive off a craggy rock as Odette and Siegfried.

Luckily, the top-notch production team had more vision than I. Townshend set the project in motion in 2012, when he asked his wife, the composer Rachel Fuller, to orchestrate the Quadrophenia album. (The liner notes were the basis for the ballet’s plot, though many details from the film were incorporated, like Ace Face’s bleached hair, styled after Sting’s memorable portrayal in the movie.) The ballet premiered last June in London, codeveloped by Sadler’s Wells, Extended Play, and Universal Music UK Production. The production values were high all around: the Shakespearean expert Robert Ashford directed, Paul Smith designed the terrific costumes, Yeastculture.org made the cool video projections, and Christopher Oram designed the fantastic mobile sets. The genre-spanning choreography was by Paul Roberts, who recently passed away, and in a post-show speech Townshend explained how he brought the show to City Center on his own dime to honor Roberts’s memory.