How do you take on a legendary band like The Who without losing face, nor to mention credibility?

The members of the Denton-based five-piece Oso Closo — Adrian Hulet on piano and vocals, Ryan Jacobi on drums, Lindsey Miller and Chris McQueen on guitar, and Andy Rogers on bass — said you do it really carefully, and with a lot of collaboration. Some chutzpah doesn’t hurt, either.

The local band got picked up by the Dallas Theatre Center to supply the air-rending power chords of The Who’s Tommy, the world’s first rock opera. The Dallas company approached the opera as the maiden voyage of its brand new artistic director, Kevin Moriarty. When the theater company decided that, yes, it would try the rock opera, it was walking on land that had been plowed over and over. The opera was made into a film starring Ann Margaret, it was staged as a ballet and reinterpreted on Broadway. This is after The Who recorded the album and played the whole opera at Woodstock.

Moriarty didn’t want to steal from any of his sources, an order that meant a lot of sweat on the brows of Oso Closo musicians.

McQueen said a friend from the Denton scene called him and tipped him off to Dallas Theatre Center’s search for a rock band.

“He said Dallas Theatre Center needed a band, a group of musicians who could read music,” McQueen said. “Our manager checked it out and said ‘This is what we’re doing and it’s going to be the coolest.’”

Moriarty doesn’t have a problem defending his decision to skip a fuller pit orchestra in favor of the five local musicians.

“Tommy was created in 1969 as the first rock opera, first with a record album,” Moriarty said. “When The Who launched a concert tour, they’d perform the whole thing, just on stage. No characters, nothing. Just playing it onstage. So Tommy has a history and lived most fully as a rock concert. I wanted to capture the youthfulness, the energy and the raw power of Tommy.”

Moriarty said he knew he wanted a rock band.

“When I moved to Dallas and decided to do Tommy, I said I had to find a great rock ’n’ roll band, and they need to have a contemporary voice all their own. I wanted to capture it in its freshness.”

He found out that Denton was home to a thriving music scene, and Oso Closo was referred to him.

“I downloaded their CD from myspace.com, and I was like ‘they are perfect.’ Then, I went to see them at Andy’s. They had great stage presence,” he said. “For one thing, they are a loud, aggressive rock band who can really go to an intense, crazy place that will raise the hairs on the back of your neck. They have a huge attack and their songs are amazingly, technically wonderful. Their guitarist is one of the best guitarists I’ve heard in a long time.”

Oso Closo has been playing for four years and has a jam-packed CD, Rest, which was released last year.

“This is something we take seriously,” said lead singer Adrian Hulet. “This is definitely a career band. Basically, I wouldn’t be in a band for four years that I wouldn’t be in 30 years.”

The band worked with director Moriarty and musical director Lindy Heath Cabe to make the music fresh.

“We’re using the best of The Who’s music as a quartet, the Broadway version and the movie version,” said drummer and University of North Texas graduate Ryan Jacobi. “They are all quite different, and we basically took the best from all of those and put it together, but we made it our own. We’re playing this the way we’d cover it.”

McQueen said the goal was to recreate the opera in collaboration with the Dallas Theatre Center’s directorial team, not to revive the Broadway version.

“To me, what Oso Closo is doing is a lot like an artist interpreting something by Shakespeare. Having their voice at the center of this thing has been really, really great,” Moriarty said.

Miller said the album means to tell the story of Tommy, but leaves some holes.

“Chris has done some writing to cover some of that,” she said. “Like in the murder scene, he’s written some original music that fills in some of what wasn’t there in the score, but if you listen to it, it sounds like it belongs. That’s something they’ve done to make everything come together. I think the band giving this a fresh perspective musically might bring in some new people.”

“It doesn’t seem right at times to ask someone to sing against their nature and use their God-given gift in a way they aren’t used to using it,” Cabe said. “Our Mrs. Walker is trained and from New York. Originally, we taught the music with just a piano in the room. The actor playing Capt. Walker asked me: ‘Do you want me to have a Broadway approach or a rock ’n’ roll approach?’ I told them: ‘Let’s work toward rock ’n’ roll.’ But then, when they started working with the band, they really started to move in a direction that was really naturally more like what the band is doing.”

The band appears on stage with the multi-cultural cast. They are in costume, and they intentionally interact with the performers during the opera. They play from memory, not from the charts they wrote.

“Its cool to see one little idea go through the creative process and become this complete visual thing,” Hulet said. “We sort of tell the story of blind, deaf and dumb Tommy, but then he has this awakening and we celebrate with him, musically.”

Moriarty said he’s glad he decided not to hide the band in a pit or off stage.

“What I think is so great about this is the live-rock feel,” he said. “In some musicals, the music is in the background. The story helps makes sense of the music and usually it’s the other way around, the music helps make sense of the story.”

Jacobi said the band gets to play around with the music on stage, improvising here and there, and playing what the moment calls for.

“You follow the rules, but you play around within them,” he said.

The band members said the rock opera had more influence on their live performance than they could imagine.

“I think it’s definitely had an impact on what we do as a band,” McQueen said. “Whenever we did our live show, we used strings. Our motto was ‘bigger is better.’ In addition to wanting to dress and look better when we do a gig, we’re also learning to make a show, you know? We’re not just being about playing. We want to entertain, too. This has taught us a lot about that.”

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com .