Hair is more than just a musical: it is a social and cultural phenomenon, a jubilant assertion of life and freedom and a cry of protest against politicians who, in the late 1960s, sent a generation of young Americans to war.
The great thing about Diane Paulus’s revival, which imports an entire Broadway company to London, is that it sees the show in two ways. It recognises that Hair was a product of its time, yet it also presents it as a vibrant, joyous piece of living theatre.
To get Hair’s measure, you have to use a bit of historical imagination; or, if you’re of my age, simply recall the spirit of the 1960s and the mass protests against the Vietnam war. As the director-critic Charles Marowitz wrote of the 1968 London production: “Without Vietnam and the American repugnance to that war, the show would never have come into being. It is almost entirely nourished by the current generation’s hatred of what its ‘senior citizens’ have allowed America to become.”
You see that in the admittedly tenuous storyline conceived by Gerome Ragni and James Rado. It focuses on Claude, the son of uptight parents who tell him: “This is 1967 — not 1947,” and who want him to join the real world of work and military induction. Instead Claude, who poignantly dreams of “Manchester, England” as a fountainhead of pop culture, becomes part of a free-loving hippy tribe. Claude gets caught up in a three-way relationship with the politicised Sheila and the anarchic Berger. But, torn between his tribal allegiance and his genetic orthodoxy, Claude fails to dodge the draft. He ends up uniformed, hair-shorn and dead: another pointless sacrifice to the war.
The show was born out of protest, but its spirit is one of affirmation. It’s a sobering fact that by the end of LBJ’s presidency in 1969, the number of American servicemen killed and wounded was 222,351. By an eerie irony, that is very close to the number of “visible hippy dropouts” identified by an American sociologist, Professor Lewis Yablonsky, in the summer of 1967. Hair is very much an assertion of their credo. Today we may find their faith in flower power, astrology and chemical experiments naive. But Hair brought counter-cultural values to a mass audience and helped loosen up a whole generation.
All this is recognised in Paulus’s production. It doesn’t, as the most recent London revival at the Gate fatally did in 2005, attempt to update the show to the time of the Iraq war. Instead it recaptures the carnivalesque optimism of the 60s, and it does this in several ways. Partly by breaking down the barrier between stage and auditorium: never before have I had my hair mussed, in one evening, by so many touchy-feely actors. Without attempting to emulate the pyrotechnic, strobe-lit dazzle of Tom O’Horgan’s original production, Paulus also makes this a genuinely tribal show in which the spirit of the ensemble is greater than any individual.
Above all, Paulus and her music director, Richard Beadle, give full value to Galt MacDermot’s 40 songs which, with lyrics by Ragni and Rado, deluge us with delight. Some numbers are better than others. For me, the high point of the evening remains the transformation of Hamlet’s What a Piece of Work is Man into a rock lyric for three voices. What makes it all the more moving is that it segues into a plangent choral lament of “How dare they try to end this beauty?” But I also still warm to Frank Mills, with its simple sigh over a lost love, and the anthemic power of those classic openers and closers, Aquarius and Let The Sunshine In.
I confess that for me the show is bathed in nostalgia. It whisked me back to seeing Ragni and Rado perform in Hair in LA in 1969 when I’ve rarely felt such an electric current between stage and audience. But, although for some it may be old hat to hear a song celebrating “sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus,” and for others, morally dubious to encounter such a lax attitude to LSD, one should never forget that Hair was an historic theatrical breakthrough. At a time when the stage musical was totally divorced from the surrounding rock culture, MacDermot’s score brought the two together. In Britain, the show was also the first to benefit from the abolition of Lord Chamberlain’s powers of censorship. What is astonishing is that we tolerated his tyranny for so long.
Hair is part of all our yesterdays. But it is here given exultant new life by Paulus’s production. I can only salute the cascading energy of her cast led by Gavin Creel as Claude, Caissie Levy as the demonstrating Sheila, Will Swenson as the shaggily stoned, self-consciously hammy Berger and Sasha Allen as the brass-lunged Dionne. Karole Armitage’s choreography also keeps the joint jumping and Scott Pask’s design ironically enthrones the excellent band in a vast military truck. I wouldn’t deny for a moment that Hair is a period piece. But what matters is that it celebrates a period when the joy of life was pitted against the forces of intolerance and the death-dealing might of the military-industrial complex. As Shakespeare once said: “There’s sap in’t yet.”
- Until 8 January. Box Office: 0844 482 5130/quote]
