Tommy, the Who’s 1969 rock opera about a deaf, dumb and blind pinball player, has long been a staple of my playlist. Exciting, then, to see it updated for this year’s Adelaide festival. As the performance got underway, the bland staging and projections – the polar opposite to the amazing show on offer at Blinc in Elder Park – were, I reasoned, just superficial flaws. But halfway through the overture, as I tried to pick out Pete Townshend’s melodies, I started to worry.

By the second interruption by director-cum-narrator Eric Mingus, who plodded around the stage in a private scat ecstasy, that worry turned to frustration. At times, Mingus’s florid vocals overflowed into conducting, his rigid open hand thrust randomly at the horn section like an evangelical preacher. Meanwhile, the actual conductor dutifully did his thing and an actor stage-whispered his lyrics in a minor key.

Around the halfway point, with bongos and horns at peak jazz, I realised we were trapped in one well-intentioned artist’s misguided passion project. The show was described as a re-imagining, but by forcing Tommy into such a radical, free-form departure, the music and the plot had been gutted. Long gaps between numbers killed any surviving slivers of narrative flow. Actors in mismatched costumes and dramatic registers came and went abruptly. Was this a gig or a piece of theatre? It felt like neither.

The musicians were a tight bunch. Several times, the drummer shone as he channelled the energy of Keith Moon – you could tell he was enjoying himself. In fact, everyone on stage seemed to be having a swell time. Whether or not the audience was didn’t seem to matter. My companion, who’d never heard Tommy before, left none the wiser as to plot or the Who’s musical legacy. I left feeling like something I love had been exploited.

Part of the charm of Tommy is its musical naivety. These are simple rock songs and refrains. They weren’t designed to withstand jazz enemas. And why did Pinball Wizard need “re-imagining” as a creeping 90s ballad?

For most of the show, Orange is the New Black’s Yael Stone as Tommy stood motionless amid the band, swamped by it. Occasionally, she twitched to convey “disability”. Eventually, the character re-emerged to perform a raunchily impassioned closer. Full marks for effort but, by that point, none of it made any sense.

Mingus had the last word with an end-of-run speech that seems too cheap to repeat were it not so telling. Right there, the man who had just finished flaying one of our greatest rock operas, said that, at the outset of this project, people had told him to forget it. I for one would like to find those people and thank them for their efforts.

• Adelaide festival 2015 runs from 27 February to 15 March at venues citywide. Find all Guardian Australia’s coverage here