For many of us who were teenagers in the late 60s/early 70s (or for those younger fans who came to love the album later), the songs from the Broadway musical Hair have an almost incantatory power. It may in fact be hard for us to separate our nostalgic inner teen from an objective critical perspective about Hair.
This is by way of preface to my saying: The Public Theater's new production of Hair in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park is the most exhilarating evening of entertainment I’ve experienced in a long time. If you’ve never spent time singing along to the 1968 original cast album, you may want to take my opinion with a grain of salt. But I know there are many thousands, if not millions, of others who are excited at the very mention of this new production. And to you I say: Don’t hesitate – prepare right now to stand in line for your free tickets, either in person in the park, or in the “virtual line” at the Public Theater’s web site. This engagement is playing six nights a week through the end of August.
Hair has never been perfect – its book is often thin, sketchy, even crude, and the song lyrics vary from the very charming to the impenetrable to the downright silly. (Did even the authors know what “supreme visions of lonely tunes” means?) But the score by Galt MacDermot is often spectacularly successful, and when it is as well performed as it is here, it can be completely transporting. Some are likely to write it off as a quaint or ridiculous period piece in any case. But the songs are both of their time and timeless.
The show is set in the East Village of 1968, among a “tribe” of flower children/draft resisters/dropouts who spend a couple of hours sharing with us their delight in polymorphous sex, marijuana, and communal good vibes, while playfully and sometimes fiercely mocking the racism, war-mongering, and general up-tightness they see around them. It eventually becomes the tragic story of Claude Hooper Bukowski, one of the onstage tribe, who is ambivalent about burning his draft card, with devastating consequences. (The parallels of the Vietnam era to our contemporary unpopular war in Iraq are readily apparent, and fortunately the cast and crew of this Hair don’t feel the need to hit you over the head with them.)
The first act is more lighthearted and often very funny, although it opens and closes with two now-famous numbers that foreshadow the more moving second act. You can feel the electricity in the audience as the lights go down and the superlative onstage band begins to play “Aquarius,” and there is an eruption of excitement as Patina Renea Miller breaks into the familiar, soaring opening lines sung originally by Melba Moore: “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.” An hour later, the act closes with Claude (Spring Awakening’s Jonathan Groff) singing the wistful ballad “Where Do I Go?” while behind him the rest of the cast disrobes in a scene that scandalized Broadway 40 years ago.
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