Meet the Pete Townshend-approved breakout star of ‘The Who’s Tommy’ on Broadway
Ali Louis Bourzgui didn’t grow up jamming out to “Pinball Wizard” and “Baba O’Riley.”
The actor, after all, was born more than three decades after The Who’s first album “My Generation” came out in 1965.
His generation is Z.
And yet, last August, the lucky 24-year-old was a VIP at their concert in England as he chatted backstage with legendary guitarist Pete Townshend.
“I went and hung out with Pete and got to sit down and talk to him for a few hours,” Bourzgui told me over lunch at Joe Allen.
“And then I got to sit backstage — like halfway onstage — and watch Roger [Daltrey] and the band perform with the whole orchestra.”
That show at the Royal Sandringham Estate lasted four hours.
“Now,” he said, “I’m a big fan.”
And they’re diehards of his, too. Bourzgui is the break-out star of “The Who’s Tommy” on Broadway, Townshend’s musical in which the young phenom rocks out as the title “deaf, dumb and blind kid” who becomes a worldwide sensation.
Bourzgui is on the verge of major things as well — thankfully less dramatically so than Tommy.
His Broadway debut is a knockout — the most exciting of the last several years. The actor’s reviews last month were euphoric (including a four-star rave from The Post), and it’s impossible to find a theater agent in town who doesn’t desperately wish he was their client.
Townshend, who first watched Bourzgui tackle the complex role of Tommy Walker at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in the summer of 2023, said he was born for the part.
“Ali hasn’t required the kind of rock ’n’ roll anointment that I have provided to some of the actors in Tommy in the past,” Townshend told The Post.
“He hasn’t needed a lecture about what makes a star, and what can cause a star to fall. He just gets it.”
And, the “Tommy” composer added, “he brings youth and good looks and a healthy head of curly black hair.”
Bourzgui, who is Moroccan American, grew up in Pittsfield, Mass., in a family of artists and performers. Long before he became the Wizard of Pinball, his first role in sixth grade was in “The Wizard of Oz.”
“A munchkin,” he said.
After studying at Ithaca College, Bourzgui moved to New York City, where he lives with a roomie and a cat, and toured the country in the musical “The Band’s Visit.”
And then, while working in Chicago, he got called in for “Tommy.”
“When he walked in, he looked fresh, he looked different,” director Des McAnuff said of his audition for the show. “He was right out of school, but there was definitely a calmness.”
Bourzgui remembers that momentous day a little differently.
“I was actually freaking out!,” he said. “I’m glad it didn’t read like that.”
In a kismet moment, the actor learned he landed the part as he was walking out of another Broadway show into Times Square.
Zen in person, onstage Bourzgui is positively nuclear. He has a stadium rocker energy (aided by yoga and an espresso shot a day) and an otherworldly voice as he, a baritone, wails tenor songs like “Sensation” and “I’m Free.”
“What he brings to the sound is a kind of warmth and depth,” McAnuff said. “A gravitas.”
Eight times a week, when Bourzgui and the “Tommy” cast sing “Listening To You” at the end of their show, a swell of audience members who are, ahem, a tad older than he is, leap to their feet, sway and pump their fists.
“It happens without fail — every performance,” Bourzgui said, in awe of the crowd’s reaction.
“It’s wonderful that people feel that mood, and that it excites them. Just for anyone to be able to [join in]. That’s the whole point of theater.”
