Review: Hair by City Theatre Company
by Michael Meigs
City Theatre's production of the 1968 musical Hair is easy to look at, lively, familiar and loud, all of which qualities I consider to be virtues. For someone who knew every note of the 1967 cast album but had never seen it on stage, City's Hair was like a binge on vanilla Oreos.
Jeff Hinkle, his four choreographers and that enthusiastic cast of twenty actor-singers keep the stage full and lively almost non-stop. They out-do Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey by far, a notable achievement given the relatively compact space available to them. As a theatre junkie, I'm always looking for a seat in the front row, but that evening I realized that for Hair I'd made an error of strategic positioning. Not because the performers got into our faces or pulled us up to dance at the end of the show -- that's part of the fun -- but because only from the middle of the house would one have a wide enough field of view.
The stage spectacle connected the 35 musical numbers performed by David Blackburn and the exuberant band into a coherent but thin narrative for me. And yes, it recalled for me the 1960s, when I was just about the age of the performers in front of me. I won't go into any nostalgia kick, but I will point out that things were very different. The Vietnam War was in full swing, a nine-year conflict that killed ten times as many American soldiers as have died in Iran and Afghanistan since the U.S. attack on Baghdad eight years ago. Because of the military draft, teenage men found their futures and perhaps their lives determined by the annual lottery choosing them by birthdates. The media were hovering, fascinated, over the war, over the alluring counter-culture, and over the protests.
Those were scarey times. Actors Ragni and Rado convinced Joe Papp to stage Hair as the first non-Shakespeare event at his Public Theatre in New York. An anti-war Chicago businessman went to see it under the misapprehension that it was about native Americans. He bankrolled further performances at a discotheque and eventually pulled strings and provided financing to get it into a legit Broadway theatre. The rest, as they say, is history. If you don't believe it, just take a look at the 15,000-word article on Wikipedia.
The show is a celebration of the total hedonism that at some time or other is the dream of just about every adolescent. Free love is nothing new in history, but since the Pill had come on the market in 1960, free love was by then potentially available to everybody. AIDS did not yet exist, and it was easy to imagine that those now sanctified as "the greatest generation" really had their heads up their asses. Middle America discovered marijuana, the funky intoxicant long known to habitues of jazz bars and jive joints, and LSD was a legal pharmaceutical drug until its prohibition in 1966.
The nude scene that closes the first act of Hair was inspired for the Broadway staging when the authors Ragni and Rado saw two men strip naked in a war protest demonstration in Central Park. Dating and sex between different races was taboo, so Ragni, Rado and composer McDermot celebrated it with the thumping anthems "Black Boys" and "White Boys."
Hair was intended to get in the face of the conventional public, metaphorically and literally.
Hinkle has indeed assembled a tribe, and over the course of the evening the audience will register the face of each member. Robby Gibbons as the masculine rouster lead Berger is a bit silly in the early scenes, threatening like a kindergartner to moon the audience, but he buys it back with his stature and strong performance later in the show. Glen Hall is Claude, the dreamer who'd really like to be from "Manchester, England, England" rather than from the squalid suburbs of New Jersey. His performance is the weakest of the lot -- in part because the script gives him very little to work with. The conflict portrayed onstage is whether or not to fling one's draft card into the burning trash can -- whereas in real life the dilemma was between semi-articulate moral conscience and the clearly defined legal obligations of citizenship. The play shows Claude pressed by his yapping tribe in one direction and harangued by his mother in the other; he is inarticulate throughout.
At the apex of the triangle with Berger and Claude is Sheila, the protestor who vows to lift the Pentagon off its base. Kylie Baker has a fine voice, and in Suzy Gidseg's di[verge] in July she demonstrated power and nuance in a complex, confessional role. In Hair, however, her role is so simple that, like Hall's, it's a caricature. She has the well-cared beauty of a UT cheerleader, and Hinkle's decision to cast her as Sheila was akin to assigning Venus to play one of the Harpies. She does a beautiful job with the lament "Easy to Be Hard."
City's Hair has lots of fine cameos -- Kirk Kelso cross-dressing as Marvin Mead; Alejandro Rodriguez as Woof the Indian, desperately in love with Mick Jagger; Kristen Bennett's charming lament with "Frank Mills" and her serious rocking out with "White Boys"; Laura Foreman's golden keening rising over the tribal chorus. The show is a kaleidoscope of fun. The original was indeed influential -- and highly profitable, spawning performances and touring companies around the globe.
The Public Theatre, the original source, produced Hair again in 2008 and it received the 2009 Tony award for best musical. The company is now at work, settled at the St. James Theatre in New York, and resumes touring September 20 at the AT&T Performing Arts Center in Dallas. A friend somewhat younger than I am told me that she'd taken her grown daughter to see the show in New York. To my friend's surprise and amusement, her daughter found it "vulgar."
This is the year 2011 and so many of the issues burning in the original production have been settled, become irrelevant, or been absorbed into the wider culture. Without those huge tensions and differences, Hair no longer provides the visceral shock of, for example, the Rude Mechs' 2009 re-creation of Dionysus in 69, anchored both in contemporary memory and in Euripides.
Wikipedia says that a Time magazine article about the 2008 staging asserted, "Today Hair seems, if anything, more daring than ever." Well, maybe; perhaps a trip to Dallas is warranted. But on the evidence of the City Theatre production, Hair reveals itself principally to be about sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, to quote Ian Drury and the Blockheads (1977). And I like it.
Review by Elizabeth Cobbe for the Austin Chronicle, September 1
EXTRA
Click to view excerpts of the program of City Theatre's production of Hair
Hair
by Gerome Ragni , James Rado, Galt McDermott
City Theatre Company
