Hair: The musical still feeling the love
http://www.metro.co.uk/metrolife/819606-hair-the-musical-still-feeling-the-love
Hair director Diane Paulus tells Metro why her revival of the 1968
rock musical still chimes with an America at war four decades later.
Claire Allfree
30th March, 2010
Backstage at the Gielgud Theatre, I look in vain for a naked body. A
nicely toned bottom, perhaps; even a bare chest would do.
Instead there is a lot of hair a lot of hair, from beards to Afros
and a lot of clothing of the loose-fitting, paisley-patterned,
(man-made) leather-fringed variety.
The stage is painted every colour of the rainbow. There are guitars.
A girl carrying a flower looks like she's about to give me a hug. I'm
pretty sceptical about hippies but I'm starting to feel the love.
Hair, the iconic, anti-Vietnam rock musical that debuted in 1968,
returns to London 41 years after it became the first production in
Britain to get naked, opening the day after the abolition of
censorship on the British stage.
'These days nudity is a lot less shocking,' says Gavin Creel, who
plays Claude, the teenager called up to fight but drawn instead to
Will Swenson's long-haired, peace-loving Age Of Aquarius tribe.
He's right: from a starkers Daniel Radcliffe in Equus to Luke
Treadaway's recent genitalia tuck at the Royal Court via Kenneth
Tynan and countless others, part of Hair's legacy has been, well, more hair.
That's not to say Diane Paulus's new Broadway production,
transferring with its Tony-winning US cast, arrives at a time when
theatre censorship is a thing of the past.
Political and religious sensitivity is a new and growing threat
note the recent decision to cancel a performance in Dudley of Philip
Ridley's anti-BNP play, Moonfleece, due to 'some of the issues raised
within the play', the local council states.
And many other issues the original musical protested against, from
war to sexual conservatism, are back on the agenda.
'The sentiment in New York before we opened was that Hair was a dated
piece that wouldn't translate,' says Swenson, who looks as laid-back
in real life as his hippy ringmaster character, Berger, does on stage.
'In fact we were amazed at how well it translated. Back in 2007, when
we first began, we were at the beginning of the Democratic primaries,
there was a whole bunch of political issues going on and a real sense
of change. And we're still in the middle of a couple of unpopular wars.'
Recent British revivals of Hair have been badly received. The show's
free love message chimed badly in the Aids-terrorised early 1990s
when Michael Bogdanov's production opened at the Old Vic, while
Daniel Kramer's Iraq war-inspired 2005 Gate Theatre production had
mixed reviews.
The most common charge against Hair is that, for all the classic rock
anthems about sunshine and the Age of Aquarius, its message is blurry
and politically naive.
After all, history quickly put paid to the flower-power optimism of
the peacenik hippy movement.
And just as the mood of 1967 had already soured by the time Hair hit
Broadway in 1968, 2008's 'hopey changey stuff', as Sarah Palin put
it, isn't looking so hot in 2010.
Paulus is quick to defend what Hair originally stood for.
'I grew up in the 1980s under Reagan and was always very politically
active, campaigning for Planned Parenthood and nuclear disarmament,' she says.
'I remember wishing I'd been alive in the 1960s. I really wanted to
know what it was like to have been young then and actually care about
your country. Whereas now, who are we? We're at war and no one cares.
I've encountered so many people who wear this apathy like a ball and chain.'
Hair was absolutely soaked in its time: it came off the street and
straight into the theatre.
'So much so that cast members would find the draft waiting for them
at the stage door,' Paulus points out. 'I want to show the idealistic
impulse of American youth in a way that makes it real, rather than as
some hippy chic lifestyle.' She stops. 'Whoa, this is getting heavy…'
Most people, of course, know Hair for its nude scene, although it's
worth remembering it's entirely voluntary in its own trippy dippy
way, Hair insists its actors strip on any given evening only if they
actively want to.
'In this age of YouTube, it's a moment of enormous trust,' points out Paulus.
And, of course, Hair invites the audience to join the cast on stage
(with clothes). 'It's ecstatic,' says Paulus. 'The main thing is
that, in this age of digital culture, Hair makes people feel truly
alive.' Go on. Share the love.
Hair previews from Thursday at London's Gielgud Theatre.
www.hairthemusical.co.uk
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Hair Revival: Mark Ravenhill turns hippy
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article7074513.ece
The playwright and former punk who wrote the play Shopping and
F***ing, has no time for hippies. How will he find the musi
March 28, 2010
Mark Ravenhill
I am watching the sexy, talented young cast of Hair playing to a
packed Broadway theatre. The bodies are beautiful, the voices are
great, the clothes and choreography are all wonderful. I should be
having a great time. But after only 20 minutes or so, I feel
overwhelmed by an atavistic fury: I realise I really hate hippies.
It's a generational thing. I reached puberty in 1977, just as punk
was reaching out from the London art-school crowd and taking hold of
us suburban schoolkids. If there was one thing punks despised above
all else, it was a hippie. Not, I realise now, the original San
Franciscan flower children of the 1960s, but the mid-1970s British
offshoot of the species: a lank-haired, morose individual who hung
around in his bedroom, burning joss sticks, flicking through a
battered copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and whose
weekly highlight was the appearance of a prog-rock monstrosity on The
Old Grey Whistle Test.
I sit in the Lower West Side apartment I'm staying in and decide that
my Age of Aquarius-induced anger is ridiculous. A revival of Hair has
been playing to packed young audiences on Broadway, and when the
American cast arrive in the West End this month, I'm sure they're
going to be a sensation in the UK. And Gus Van Sant, whose film Milk
reignited my interest in the 1970s gay-rights movement, has turned
his attention to a screen adaptation of one of the key documents of
the hippie movement, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
which should reach cinemas in 2011. The hippies are back. I better
get used to it.
Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical was first staged
off-Broadway in October 1967. With its celebration of draft-dodgers,
pill-poppers, free love across the race and gender barriers, and
letting it all (though only for about 20 seconds of stage time) hang
out, it earned cult status as quickly as it scandalised
conservatives. Audiences loved its participatory "Be-In" ending. Its
songs were taken up as protest anthems of the anti-Vietnam war movement.
A couple of days after seeing the Broadway revival, I'm on the phone
to Gavin Creel, who now plays with huge, charismatic sex appeal
Hair's central character, Claude.
In the few moments of the show that are dedicated to a plot, Claude
fails to burn his draft card and is subsequently killed in 'Nam. Does
Creel, who is on the cusp of his thirties, feel any connection with
the show's hippie tribe?
He responds with enthusiasm. "I've never been in a show like this
where the whole cast so totally identifies with the roles. On stage
and off, we are the Tribe."
Isn't that what it always feels like to be at the centre of a hit
show? If I speak to him next year and he's in a revival of Thoroughly
Modern Millie, he'll tell me the same thing.
Creel laughs. "Maybe, but I don't think so. I really think this show
touches something that is close to our lives in a way that other
shows don't. We're coming out of the stage door every night and there
are teenagers telling us that they are so affected by the piece."
Isn't that the problem: Hair leaves you with a lovely warm feeling,
with little incitement to any real action? "The cast are really
walking the walk," Creel says emphatically. (I hope he can't hear my
wince at his choice of phrase.) "We're out there, as a cast,
protesting for things like gay marriage equality."
There's a certain irony in that, I point out. After all, the hippies
wanted communal living and to make love not war. And here you are
marching for the right to form nuclear families and to be allowed to
fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"It's the same thing," Creel says.
It really isn't, I insist. But he presses on: "It's the same
idealism. It's about the right to choose who you want to be."
Ah, "choice", I think to myself. The catch-all phrase for the modern
liberal and conservative alike. And nothing much to do with the
hippies. But surely there must be some differences between the cast
and the characters? Are you all taking psychedelic drugs and
practising free love? "We're more sort of into camomile tea," he says
with a laugh. "And steaming our voices. We're in a Broadway show."
I come away from the call thinking what a nice guy Creel is. He's
clearly passionate about Hair, and if his thinking is a bit fuzzy
about the gap between his world and the hippies well, what was I
expecting? He's an actor in a show.
The next day I have coffee with Hair's director, Diane Paulus, at
Sardi's, which, despite its rather faded glamour, is still the
Broadway worker's choice of meeting place. I quickly establish that
Paulus is the same age as me, 43. Did she ever experience, I wonder,
the punk backlash against the hippies? Did she own (as I did) a "Kill
a hippie" badge?
Paulus doesn't answer my question. In fact, she doesn't answer many
of my questions. She just pushes ahead, talking about "change" and
"hope". I'm starting to feel irritated. I want to say: "Could you
please stop turning verbs into abstract nouns? You're debasing the
language of political discourse." But I decide against this esoteric
line of approach and instead say that I've realised since I saw the
show why it had such an immediate impact on Americans: everyone I
spoke to has a family member who was either drafted, avoided the
draft or burnt their draft card.
"I think many people experience a huge sense of sadness watching
Hair," she tells me. "They see the idealism up there and they think,
'How did we lose that?' We opened this production in Central Park in
2008 the election year when people were really wanting to
reconnect with hope."
Did she consider any substantial rewrites? After all, with the
distance of time, doesn't it seem a little surprising that the
Vietnamese are totally absent from the piece? It's all about
Americans and whether they should fight or die, while the Vietnamese
are invisible, silent. "But so many young Americans died in that
war," she says, an emotional catch in her throat.
I'm not denying that, I say, and it seems ghoulish to trade
fatalities, but surely the war was an even greater tragedy for the
Vietnamese? She deflects again. "The African-American voice is very
well represented in the piece."
I leave full of a grumpy discontent about American liberals, their
inability to engage in argument and their constant appeal to
sentiment. I don't want to feel this way, but I'm starting to hate
Hair and the hippies all over again.
So I'm a little nervous to be back in Sardi's a couple of days later
to talk to Jim Rado, the surviving member of the team that created
Hair. Now in his late seventies, Rado bears a striking resemblance to
Iggy Pop. Today, he favours a septuagenarian version of skater-boy
clothes: baggy jeans with keys clipped to the waist, a green
tracksuit top and a beanie, from which his grey-turning-white hair
flops over his ears. Isn't it incredible, I say as a way of breaking
the ice, to be the creator of a show that has changed so many
people's lives? He smiles at me benignly. "Has it? Did you read that
on the internet?"
No, I say, I've got older friends in the UK who saw the original
production, and it was an important moment in their lives. "It's kind
of trippy, isn't it?" he says, and chuckles. I instantly warm to
Rado's relaxed modesty. After 40 years, he still seems delighted and
rather surprised by Hair's success.
Rado was a young jobbing actor when he met his Hair collaborator,
Gerome Ragni. At the time, both were appearing in a short-lived
musical from Britain about capital punishment. "I can't remember
exactly how Hair began," Rado says. "But maybe as I talk to you it
will become clearer in my mind." He remembers that he and Ragni
shared an enthusiasm for writing a musical and were quickly drawn to
the hippies they saw on the streets of New York. He recalls meeting a
flower child for the first time in St Mark's Place. "He was just so
sweet and gentle. There was none of that macho stuff. Men could go up
to each other and hold one another. We'd never seen that before."
In 2008, Rado told The Advocate magazine that he and Ragni were
lovers for a while. I steel myself to ask him about their
relationship. So you and Ragni were what? Friends, lovers? "Gerry
and I had a very deep love for each other," Rado says, smiling
fondly. We are talking at quite a volume (I think Rado might be a
little deaf) and have already attracted quite a bit of head-turning
from Sardi's lunching ladies. I want to ask: "But were you sleeping
with him?" But I don't.
The pair would head up to Central Park. "We'd go to be-ins and less
formal things, and we'd see the hippies do things like they'd burn
a draft card, or one day a couple of guys took off all their clothes
and so we'd put that into the show."
I notice he always talks about the hippies as "they". Did he ever
consider himself a hippie? "No. We could see that something was
happening and we wrote it down. But we weren't living the life. We
never even tried pot until quite a while after the show had opened."
I suddenly feel that I've "got" Hair. The show isn't really about the
Vietnam war or the big abstracts of Hope and Change. It's about two
young men experiencing a love they can't quite articulate and
breathlessly recording a movement they observed, but never joined.
It's a bit of pop psychology on my part, and maybe way off the mark.
But for me it explains not only the intellectual and narrative
fuzziness of Hair, but the emotional warmth at its centre. As I say
goodbye to Rado, I find myself looking forward to seeing the show
again in London. He's taught me to love Hair. And hippies? Well, I
wouldn't kill one any more. Let's just leave it at that.
.
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