http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article7077691.ece
As the Broadway production of the tribal rock musical comes to
London, we are reminded of the swinging era when we still had Hair
March 29, 2010
Benedict Nightingale
There's a point in Hair, the "tribal rock musical" that its latest
Broadway cast are about to bring to London, when the cast of hippies,
druggies and shaggy drop-outs literally let it all hang out. They
shed their flowers, feathers, red American football tops and spoof GI
uniforms and face the audience in Adam and Eve pre-figleaf mode. That
was important back in 1968, when the show arrived in the West End,
because it was the first definitive proof that the theatrical censor
had at long last lost his power to chop, cut, ban and destroy.
Oh, and it was important to me, too, because it was also the first
proof that I needed specs if I wasn't to miss the unmissable but
actually see what all the voyeuristic fuss was about.
But you would have had to have been very clear-sighted to have
foreseen the original show's success in New York. The impresario Joe
Papp, who was about to open a new auditorium in the old East Village
library that he had converted into the Public Theatre, had received a
version of Hair in the form of a few handwritten pages of yellow
paper and absently placed them at the bottom of his slush pile. But
in early 1967 he was accosted on a train by their co-author, Gerome
Ragni, a Goldilocks clone who had been a spear-carrier in his
production of Julius Caesar. So Papp looked at the so-called script,
concluded that some songs were smart and some silly, liked a scene in
which a conscript talked of going to fight in Vietnam, and was
impressed by the show's sense of the loneliness of disaffected young
Americans.
Soon afterwards he ditched his plan to open his Anspacher Theatre
with John Arden's Armstrong's Last Goodnight, asking himself: "Why
the hell am I doing an English play?" Instead, he opted for the
topical but worryingly costly, hugely aberrant musical that Ragni and
James Rado kept rewriting on the backs of envelopes. Stoned actors
and hippies meandered through the building. There were rows and
walkouts. In came Galt MacDermot, a straight-looking former church
organist, to compose new songs, including one that began "Welcome
sulphur dioxide, hello carbon monoxide". In came the designer Ming
Cho Lee, begging for a proper script and getting one that opened with
two pages on which a single word, "hair", was written again and again.
"I thought Joe had gone crazy," Lee told Papp's biographer, Helen
Epstein. And the designer certainly had his troubles, hiring a
assistant who started out neat and clean, then stopped washing, let
his hair grow and burnt incense on the tables that Lee had set up in
the supposed safety of his bedroom. But Papp remained his usual
optimistic self throughout not-so-usual crises. The scenic artists'
union called a strike, forcing Lee to beat the picket line by hauling
half-painted sets out of the building and finishing the job himself.
And Papp fired and replaced the director, Anna Sokolow, just before
October 17, 1967, the date of a first preview that was an
unsurprisingly chaotic mix of two people's ideas.
But none of that could stop a show that does, after all, celebrate
human chaos. Clive Barnes, the daily critic of the all-powerful New
York Times, came to a later preview, reportedly fell asleep, but
still wrote that the musical was "well worth seeing". Walter Kerr,
the paper's stately Sunday critic, was cooler, maybe because he
didn't appreciate being offered pot by passing actors; but only the
radical Village Voice was totally hostile, calling Hair crass and
opportunistic. And the inevitable publicity paid off. The show sold
out and did so again when it moved to Broadway.
Funnily enough, the notorious nude scene was added only when the show
arrived on the Great White Way, provoking Kerr to quote Groucho Marx,
who had said that he could have stayed at home, stripped in front of
the mirror and so saved himself the price of a ticket. The composer
Richard Rodgers left at the interval, unable to take more of an
evening that left him feeling that a show seemingly free-associated
by beatniks had made his kind of carefully structured musical
obsolete. But the public responded to the sprawl and disarray of Hair
both on Broadway, where it ran for five years, and then all over the
world, eventually making a special impact in Eastern Europe, where
the dawning of the age of Aquarius was clearly long overdue.
But it would never have opened in London if the Lord Chamberlain, as
our courtly censor was called, had still been in power. His
"assistant examiner" had been willing to recommend the show for a
licence if the words "piss, balls, fart, shit and cock" were removed,
along with a stage direction in which one character laid a hand on
another's crotch. But a more senior apparatchik had disagreed,
calling Hair a demoralising show that "extols dirt,
anti-establishment views, homosexuality, free love and inveighs
against patriotism". His own boss had added that the musical was
"dangerously permissive" and the Lord Chamberlain himself,
perturbed especially by the nudity, had banned three different
versions of Hair.
And only weeks after the old gentleman has been dispatched to the
knacker's, I saw (or rather half-saw) Hair from the dress circle of
the Shaftesbury Theatre, surrounded by people watching through
binoculars that I disdained, thinking that my literal as well as my
critical vision was 20-20. But then came the interval. "When are they
taking their clothes off," I asked a friend. "They just did," he
replied. It seemed that the nude scene had passed, if you'll forgive
me, in a flash. Next day I joined the spectacle-wearing classes, and
have been a member ever since.
Those specs were necessary, too, because Hair had an immediate impact
on the newly liberated theatre. No fringe show seemed complete
without a set of male genitalia waving like sea anemones. It brought
more serious freedoms, too. The Lord Chamberlain was especially
hostile to shows that might offend friendly nations. Only a year
before the arrival of Hair, which exuded counter-culture horror at
all American authority figures, the Theatre Royal, Stratford East,
had become a members-only club in order to stage Barbara Garson's
satirical Macbird, which accused President Lyndon Johnson of
murdering Ken O'Dunc (John F. Kennedy). But now politically scathing
dramatists were everywhere, among them a promising young writer who
then worked for an agitprop group called Portable Theatre and would
one day bring on stage George W. Bush in an Iraq play called Stuff
Happens. Hair helped to create Hare.
But such shows are apt to fade as quickly as the blooms the flower
children presented to the squares whom they hoped to convert into
hirsute polygons or frolicsome spheres. Back in 1968 even we English
entered the theatre saying such things as "this tells it how it is,
man" and wishing that we too had draft cards to drop in the foyer. I
myself wrote that Hair was a serious celebration, "a sung Eucharist
in praise of the secular gods", and found its hippies touching and
vulnerable, noting that a boy had only to reject his girl's gift of a
yellow shirt to break into an anguished song about moral indignity
and social injustice. Yet when the show was revived in the West End
five years later, I changed my tune, calling it maudlin and witless:
a celebration, yes, but of "drivelling parasites who drift from
half-felt experience to half-felt experience, half-formed belief to
half-formed belief".
Well, my excuse was that the cynical 1970s had replaced the
optimistic 1960s. And when the show was revived in the West End in
1993 most critics treated it forgivingly, as if it were a freaked-out
Salad Days or zonked No, No Nanette. Hair had become a period piece,
a curio, despite the efforts of the director, Michael Bogdanov, to
brash it up. He emphasised a denouement in which the shorn hippie,
Claude, emerged from an acid trip to be mown down by the Vietcong and
left splattered on a stage filled with roaming skeletons.
A revival at the intimate little Gate in London in 2005 took that
approach farther. It was energetic, intense, and so fiercely hostile
that, when the nude scene came, those in the front row must have been
tempted to stretch out a hand and end the actors' hopes of
fatherhood. But this time there were several nude scenes, one of
which evoked the human pyramids at Abu Ghraib. You see, the musical
had been updated to the Iraq era and came with a spoof Bush and a
sergeant who asked his men to "get your ass out and fight those
sandniggers". And Claude, originally the victim of a policy that
forced conscripts into the killing fields, had actually, if
foolishly, volunteered for the Army, baffling his fellow druggies
with his eagerness to "defend democracy".
It didn't work, but at least it reminded us that its catchy music
hadn't been forgotten. Will the new West End revival manage to be
true to its era yet somehow suggest that the story has meaning today?
Appeal to our nostalgia and to our consciences? That, I suppose, is
the challenge as long as the age of Aquarius still refuses fully to dawn.
--
Hair previews from Thursday at the Gielgud, W1 (www.hairthemusical.
co.uk; 0844 4825130), and opens on April 14
--
PAUL NICHOLAS RECALLS HIS ROLE IN THE FIRST WEST END PRODUCTION
Acting in the original London production of Hair was a life-changing
experience for me. It was my first stage show. And I met my wife,
Linzi, while I was in it too.
The assisant stage manager who first showed me on to the stage turned
out to be Cameron Mackintosh. They gave me one of the leading parts,
Claude, the young man who's eventually sent off to the Vietnam War.
It was a wonderful experience. I realised for the first time what I
wanted to do with my life: combine acting with singing.
They tried to breed a spirit within the cast, with Actors Studio
kinds of exercises to help free us up from inhibitions. The nude
scene was only brief, about 20 seconds, although as the years went by
the lights, pretty dim at first, did seem to get slightly brighter.
But nobody had to do it. You were asked to, encouraged, but you
didn't have to do it. I was never quite sure what it was meant to
represent, but then I was the only guy who didn't have to take his
clothes off because I was busy singing at the time. It was quite
liberating for the people doing it.
I don't think it upset people, really. I didn't see any maiden aunts
fainting in the aisles. But we did have the odd brown overcoat in the
front row. And we did have the odd person who'd come up on stage for
the nude scene but you couldn't really get too upset about it. We
were preaching freedom after all.
One night a number of people spontaneously came up to dance with us
at the end. And after that it seemed to happen every night.
It was the "in" show. David Niven came to see it and John Lennon.
Princess Anne came up to dance on stage. So did Judy Garland. It felt
like a charmed time. I was spoilt having this as my first show
there's been nothing since that can top the joy of it. I stayed with
it for two years.
It felt like a watershed. It felt very up to date. And it was
challenging. We were challenging the Vietnam War, challenging
people's position on marijuana. We broke lots of taboos. We greeted
the audience with flowers.
I've seen productions since. The 1993 one at the Old Vic struggled a
bit because it's such a big theatre. The theatre they're putting the
new production into, the Gielgud, is a bit smaller, and that's good.
You need to be in the audience's face a bit. And I saw a production
at the Gate a few years ago that updated it to make comments about
Bush and Iraq. It was still powerful, still good, but it didn't have the joy.
A couple of years ago I was trying to get the rights to do a 40th
anniversary concert version with the original cast. When I was trying
to think of a charity we could do it for, someone said: "Help the
Aged." I said: "Cheeky bastard."
--
Interview by Dominic Maxwell
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