The poignancy of
the iconic musical Hair is lost after decades of
removal from the turbulent 1960s.
Aside from the
complete works of the Beatles and the Motown catalog,
there is no more iconic pop music from the 1960s than the
original Broadway score of Hair, “the American Tribal Love-Rock
Musical.” The opening lines of the show, which
quickly spread from the Broadway stage throughout the
world thanks to the 5th Dimension’s Top 40 radio hit
version, entered the culture so quickly it’s as if we
were born knowing them:
When the moon is in the seventh house
And
Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then peace will
guide the planets
And love will steer the
stars
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius!
The music of
Hair was phenomenal. It was the first and last
time in the rock and roll era that a Broadway score would
take over the pop charts, yielding four hit singles and a
multimillion-selling original-cast album. As theater,
Hair was a different story –- not a structured
narrative but a “happening”: a naive,
amorphous mess of a show that dazzled its way into the
audience’s hearts through the sheer charisma of
the performers (including two of the creators, Gerome Ragni
and James Rado), the shock of seeing beautiful young
multicolored bodies briefly naked onstage, and the
novelty of seeing youth culture and sociopolitical
engagement reflected back from the conservative bastion
of the Broadway stage.
Now Hair
has been revived in a free production in Central Park
by the Public Theater, the same institution that first
staged the musical 41 years ago in its pre-Broadway
incarnation. The score is still fantastically tuneful. And
the audience has a ball –- what’s not to
love about a free show full of songs you probably
already know by heart? But the performers are not especially
charismatic; in the leading roles, Will Swenson as Berger
seems to enjoy himself running around in a leather
fringed loincloth flashing his beefy butt, but
Jonathan Groff, who was scorching as the male star of
Spring Awakening, seems bland and a little embarrassed as his
sidekick Claude. The spectacle of naked people onstage
has long since lost its novelty, if not its power to
titillate. And despite the superficial parallels between one
unpopular war and another, the hippie-era ethos of
“tune in, turn on, drop out”
doesn’t speak to the social issues that face young
people in 2008. Which leaves Hair, as a theater
piece, just a big amorphous mess.
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