Good 'Hair' Day
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Good-Hair-Day-by-Uzi-Silber-090720-883.html
by Uzi Silber
July 21, 2009
Contemporary family life for us is a dreary cycle consisting largely
of reverse commuting, laundry, piano drills, school bus drop-offs and
juvenile vegetable refusal. This leaves precious little time for much
else, let alone a night out on the town for a pair of beleaguered parents.
But last-minute complimentary orchestra seats to a Broadway play
possess a mysterious power to slam the brakes on the familial
treadmill and abruptly reshuffle parental priorities. And if such
tickets happen to be for a revival of an exciting musical full of
shapely naked people belting out great tunes, all the better.
My wife and I were the lucky recipients of such tickets. Items such
as veggies, baths, and timely bedtime once deemed so urgent,
magically vanished from our nightly must-do list and were replaced by
our severely neglected entertainment needs.
Childfree and tickets in hand, we rode the F train uptown to 42nd
street to catch a new musical revival about spoiled and horny hippies
singing and copulating in our very backyard. That musical would be Hair.
As a child in Greenwich Village, I recoiled from the shaggy and
malodorous specimens wrapped in dirty shmatehs, tossing Frisbees in
Washington Square Park. Yet there I was in the Al Hirschfeld Theater
two generations later, enjoying a howling and tousled hippie mob
charging off the stage and into the crowd, shattering that famous
'fourth wall' traditionally separating players from audience.
The lead, a Jim Morrison-Abby Hoffman hybrid known as Berger, swings
an axe at that fourth wall right from the get-go, as he gamely
confronts several unsuspecting individuals in the audience in a
yippie-inflected version of a Don Rickles Borscht Belt routine.
Berger's opening shtick seamlessly segues into the now immortalized
soundtrack that has sold all those millions of copies.
Hair first opened off-Broadway in the fall of 1967 to
thoroughly-mixed though intrigued reviews. Such contradictory
sentiments were aptly captured at the time by Howard Taubman of the
New York Times, who described the performance as an "indiscriminate
explosion of exuberant, impertinent youthful talents" where
"coherence is lacking, discipline meager and taste often deplorable."
As it happened, audiences embraced the musical's daring free-form
performance style and didn't mind its incoherence. That plot was
largely irrelevant here was a point made by a female cast member at a
press conference ahead of Hair's 1968 Broadway debut. "Man," said she
earnestly, "we're not asking you to follow anything. Just to dig
what's going on". Internalizing these instructions, I too stopped
thinkin' and started diggin'.
Despite his misgivings, Taubman did note Hair's vitality, which
reminded him of The Grand Street Follies, a popular 1920s revue named
for the fancy Lower East Side boulevard that my wife and I abandoned
for the evening. Moreover, the eminent reviewer did like the talented
cast, and correctly foresaw that the play's score would "shape up as
an authentic voice of the popular culture of 1967."
Taubman's reservations meant nothing to Tom O'Horgan, the
groundbreaking director who revamped the musical for Broadway.
Blithely ignoring the reviewer's critique, O'Horgan proceeded to
significantly ramp up the vulgarity and the sex, and in a
controversial new twist to Act I, introduced a mass display of bare
breasts alongside an assortment of other appendages otherwise safely
packed away.
The fuss surrounding the nudity on stage was considerable. The Times
reported that Belgian actress and sex symbol Monique Van Vooren had
announced her bold intention to attend opening night in a completely
transparent chiffon blouse.-
How disappointed she must have been when Vogue magazine rendered her
appearance anticlimactic by "endors(ing) the nipple as a high fashion
accessory".
Sitting beside some eleven year old who had no business being there,
and with Berger's assault dissolving into the atonal intro to
'Aquarius', I was oddly overcome by a tangential squall of images
from my own experience of the hippie era: a frayed silhouette of my
grandmother reading the Yiddish newspaper at our kitchen table on
Manhattan's West End Avenue; the pleasant aroma wafting from my dad's
pipe in his law office on Columbus Circle.
Random childhood impressions followed, of a Manhattan far grittier
and more threatening, yet refreshingly free of blackberries and
laptops, internets and MP3 players.
During intermission, we encountered Frank Lautenberg, the eminent US
Senator from across the Hudson. "Isn't this a lot of fun?" enthused
the octogenarian legislator.
With my left hand resting a wee too-familiarly on his shoulder and a
hi-ball gripped in my right, I nodded exultantly. And then, amid the
grins, drinks and chitchat, my eyes fixed on the senator's very
impressive silvery pompadour -- at a venue, I remembered, dedicated
wholly to the celebration of the human mane in all its forms.
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'Hair' flows with hippie-era vibes in Anaheim Hills
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/hair-claude-love-2502444-leigh-music
Review: The Chance Theater's staging is colorful and vibrant.
By ERIC MARCHESE
July 21, 2009
Can a show like "Hair," so much a product of its day and time, have
the same impact today as it did in the 1960s?
An outstanding new production at the Chance Theater provides a
definite answer, and it's a "no."
The combination of social and political unrest in the 1960s caused
upheavals in every aspect of society. In "Hair," subtitled "the
American tribal love-rock musical," these elements are mixed with the
high ideals of the counterculture.
Written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni (book and lyrics) and Galt
MacDermott (music), the show celebrates universal love, peace,
brotherhood and equality while depicting strife, racism and poverty.
Its characters are a group of teens in New York City who care about
creating a better society, yet often find themselves confused as to
how to get there.
The story's focus is Claude, who is deeply conflicted about whether
he should burn his draft card and dodge the draft or fight a war that
flies in the face of his pacifist beliefs. Act Two focuses on the
American military conflicts of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
Even if the show now seems to have been dug up like a time capsule,
its idealistic values are still relevant. Rado and Ragni's libretto
features just a few strands of dialogue here and there, while many of
the duo's lyrics are simply dizzying arrays of similar-sounding words.
What really drives "Hair" are songs that frame and depict the '60s
clash between the establishment and the counterculture, girded by
music that pulsates with a mixture of life, love, spirituality and
rebellion. For four decades, we've pretty much taken rock 'n' roll
for granted, but in 1968 it was shockingly new especially for a
Broadway accustomed to the sounds of Richard Rodgers and Cole Porter.
As can be expected from unconventional, essentially amateur writers
like Rado and Ragni, the songs are often touchingly naive in their
wishes for a human condition free of strife. By contrast,
MacDermott's music is polished and sophisticated.
When "Hair" first opened, most of the kids in the Chance's production
weren't even a gleam in someone's gleam. Still, director Oanh
Nguyen's cast and crew get it right (er, that is, right on).
As Claude, James May has a megawatt smile and a goofily disarming
persona. Armando Gutierrez is eccentric and extroverted in the role
of Claude's best buddy Berger, who expresses himself more vehemently,
distancing himself from anything that impinges on his freedom.
Berger interprets his girlfriend Sheila's love as nagging, and
Michaelia Leigh's plaintive style in that role is effective. David
LaMarr's Hud is crazily inspired, and Amber Snead, Emily Clark, Jenna
Romano, Ashley Nordland and Leigh Louise Kato contribute mightily to
the production's vocal tapestry.
The title number "Hair" is positively exuberant and "Aquarius" is a
lovefest of positive vibes. Leigh and Snead lead "Let the Sun Shine
In," with its unforgettable verse and incantatory chorus, and "Good
Morning Starshine," led by Leigh, is one of the show's most memorable songs.
The Chance's talented ensemble seems genuinely joyful while showing
off their considerable song-and-dance skills. Choreographer Kelly
Todd's dance moves are loose, free and wonderfully extravagant. The
offstage four-man combo led by musical director Bill Strongin is
amazingly versatile, with a quintessentially sixties sound of
amplified electric guitar, synthesizer and bass, while the nude scene
at the end of Act One is handled tastefully, the cast glimpsed
fleetingly against strong backlighting.
Erika C. Miller's costumes feature vintage hippie fashions.
Christopher Scott Murillo's set design uses metal steps, railings and
platforms upon which the actors climb, pose and dance. KC Wilkerson's
lighting design uses a wide spectrum of colors and is especially
psychedelic during Claude's lengthy hallucination-dream.
The net effect is a visual and aural feast of bodies, words, fashion,
music and lights that surround and envelop us. Nguyen ends the show
with the sudden appearance of the thousands of names inscribed upon
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a stark reminder that many of the
era's young people were literally fighting for their lives.
--
Contact the writer: emarchesewriter@gmail.com
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Players by the Sea takes audiences back to the Age of Aquarius with
musical 'Hair'
By Tamara McClaran
Jul. 22, 2009
"Hair," the award-winning musical that rocked the late 1960s, will
open Friday, July 31, on the main stage at Players by the Sea. It
will be the first time a Jacksonville-area community theater has
performed the rousing show about love, liberation and the age of Aquarius.
Players' special-event show has a limited run of only two weekends,
including midnight performances on both Saturdays, and is not
included in season ticket membership.
Written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni with music by Galt MacDermot,
"Hair" broke new ground in musical theater by defining the genre of
the "rock musical." The musical's profanity, its depiction of the use
of illegal drugs, its treatment of sexuality and its nude scene
caused much comment and controversy when it debuted off Broadway in
October 1967.
While profanity, drug use, sexuality and nudity may not be viewed as
shocking today, the show contains adult material, including a nude
scene. Players by the Sea directors Lee Hamby and Barbara Williams
are using a thoughtful approach to make the American tribal love rock
musical as authentic as possible.
"The play is about liberation," Williams said. "Our goal is to put it
into context with all of the passion and the grit."
"Hair" tells the story of the "tribe," a group of politically active,
long-haired hippies of the Age of Aquarius fighting against
conscription to the Vietnam War and living a bohemian life together
in New York City. Claude, his good friend Berger, their roommate
Sheila and all their friends struggle to balance their young lives,
loves and the sexual revolution with their pacifist rebellion against
the war and the conservative impulses of their parents and society.
Ultimately Claude must decide whether or not to resist the draft, as
his friends have done.
Williams and Hamby held auditions in April and assembled a 23-member
cast. In keeping with the 1960s' famous hippie counter-culture
message of "don't trust anyone over 30," the cast members' median age
is approximately 21. The cast includes several veterans of musical
theater shows at Players by the Sea along with several new faces.
"Hair" features many well-known songs, including "Aquarius" and "Good
Morning Starshine." Samuel Clein is the production team's musical
director with choreography by Niki Stokes. While the songs are
brilliant, the directors are also presenting most of the play's
scenes to fully tell its story.
"We are taking this show back to the original," Hamby said. "We don't
want to make it something it's not."
For reservations, call 249-0289 or visit playersbythesea.org.
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