When I was 10 years old, my older brother had a "portable" record player up in his room. I used to take the speakers that could detach from the sides of the main unit, face them towards each other, and lie down between them to listen to music from Strauss to The Who.
The Who music, in particular, was Tommy, their concept album 
about a blind, deaf, and mute boy who nevertheless was a whiz at pinball and developed a following. I played the grooves off the album, and knew every word of the lyrics (still do). But much of it simply didn't make sense because there was no context to put the lyrics in.
Fast forward almost 40 (ouch!) years, and the Dallas Theater Center is putting on "The Who's Tommy", and we saw it on Friday night. It was awesome! A local rock band played the music; all the guitarists were wireless, and they and the band's vocalist walked around the multistory industrial stage and interacted with the cast while playing. The character Tommy aged by switching out boys-to-men wearing the same shirt as the musical progressed. The stage had water pouring into, around, and down onto it. And the lyrics to the songs finally make some kind of SENSE after all these years! We took our 14-year old to see it, and though reluctant at first ("It's a MUSICAL???"), he was a thorough convert by the end. I think we're going to try and catch one more performance before it closes.
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