Hair
By Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt McDermott
Thebarton Theatre
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
By the time Hair opened at the Biltmore Theatre in New York in April 1968 many of the major happenings of Hippie history had already… happened. More than a year earlier in January 1967, twenty thousand turned up (and on) for the Human Be-In in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. That was the year of the Summer of Love, photogenically documented with lots of groovy articles in those well-known organs of radicalism, Time and Life. One of the perplexing realities of the counter-culture was that its anarcho-syndicalist, pacifist libertarianism was such a cinch to market back to the squares.
If there were truly radical viruses abroad at that time- and there were in student politics, black power and the rapidly mobilising anti-war movement – they were still mostly carried by the media and the record industry. The music is especially interesting. Bastions of corporate America like Capitol and RCA were now making a fortune out of psychedelia and all manner of other brainrot. Commentators like Louis Menand have shrewdly observed the widespread trappings of the late Sixties ersatz-high society- light shows, day-glo, tie-dye, fish eye lenses. Whether you were in South Bend, Indiana, Manchester England, England or suburban Australasia you didn’t need a diagram to know what Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds was about, or eleven minutes of the Doors, or the Byrds’ Eight Miles High.
This spaced out music was coming from all directions. Lennon and McCartney had gone global with All You Need is Love and the Stones, surrounded by Afghan rugs, were aspiring to their own satanic majesty. But it was a hard-core of West Coast inter-galactics, musically inferior perhaps, but from the authentic Haight Ashbury heartland- bands like Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Country Joe and the Fish , Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead- that were really carrying the torch. They all had surrealist names and album designs indecipherable to the optically uninitiated. They were the return of the Ghost Dance, a polymorphous caravanserai that made CBS richer than Scrooge McDuck.
It was around this time that the record industry started to understand market diversification. In such high times there was room for everyone. Friendly marijuana pop from the Loving Spoonful, the Monkees and the Association. Or, for those who just wanted to watch, there was Scott McKenzie’s San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair), The Mamas and the Papas’ California Dreaming and The Fifth Dimension (on the new, hip Andy Williams Show) taking you Up, Up and Away.
For me, that was about where Hair fitted in. It was like those false moustaches and sideburns advertised in the San Francisco Oracle for the compleat weekend hippie. It was bigger than God of course. The Hair album ranked number one in the US for twenty weeks in 1968 and then stayed in the charts for three years by which time it sold in excess of five million copies. Good Morning Starshine, Aquarius, Hair, all became singles hits- for such luminaries as Oliver, and the Cowsills and the Fifth Dimension. I ask you. Next to Disraeli Gears, Are You Experienced, or even Sunshine Superman and Moby Grape this stuff was, well – just show business. It had as much to do with the floral revolution as West Side Story had to juvenile delinquency.
On stage in the Thebarton Theatre, Hair, the stage show is an odd phenomenon. Even though it is now being presented in a snood of nostalgia, Hair has had a lively history in this country. Jim Sharman’s 1969 production was a challenge to popular entertainment in Australia, outspoken in sexual values and fiercely anti-war at the height of LBJ-ism. In its time, Hair’s nudity, ragged musicality and energetic theatricality were genuinely liberating to those who saw it and deeply abhorrent to those who hadn’t but regarded it as an invasion of visigoths anyway. As Sharman writes in the programme notes – Hair was ‘a long overdue revenge on a reactionary, uninspired regime that had outstayed its welcome.’
Unfortunately, nearly twenty five years on, Hair does little more than remind us how moribund music theatre has been since 1969. It is a monument to the one time that social and political issues actually impinged on Broadway (and its branch offices world-wide) – but it was a freak of business, one of those exceptions which so splendidly ensure the rule. Certainly few other works of popular entertainment had commented so openly on US foreign policy. Hair dealt with questions of race at a time when Governor Wallace and Mayor Daley held public office, it also embraced sexual liberation and tolerance – even if it flunked the basic feminist PC test. In fact, its achievement seems greater now than in its time, when it seemed so much part of the swim.
But that’s only because there is so little in the swim at the moment. These are peculiarly unimaginative times for theatre and its allied trades and part of that lack of imagination is reflected in the current impulse to haul sixties and seventies relics out of cryonic suspension.
Staged by David Atkins, Nigel Triffitt and Graeme Blundell with costumes by Laurel Frank, Hair combines some strong talents from the recent past but despite the restraint in presentation and a faithfulness to the spirit of the task, the show remains a curiosity. Triffitt’s set, a chrome and neon structure surrounded by dense rigging is decorated with indigenous psychedelia as well as sparklies for David Murray’s obligatory strobes. Laurel Frank’s costumes, archaeologically precise for the most part, also feature neo-hippie embellishments in the big production numbers.
In the leads, Justin O’Connor as Claude, Terry Serio as Berger, Melvin Carroll as Walter and Meredith Chipperton as Sheila, give spirited performances of songs that still carry some of their original wit and charm – Manchester England, Frank Mills, Air and others show Ragni and Rado’s off-centre lyrics blending creatively with McDermot’s often imaginative score. The band, led by Michael Kocent on keyboards, indicate that the past twenty years have been good for sound technology. If anything has energised this revived Hair it is the strength and clarity of the music.
Hair remains a mix of sub-standard pop and smart music theatre. The final cluster of songs- What a Piece of Work is Man, Good Morning Starshine and The Flesh Failures- which I only ever knew from the album, offer very different meaning in the context of the show where Claude, the conscripted hippie killed in Vietnam, is returned in a body bag to the arms of the tribe. In this production it remains a potent anti-war tableau. But, as with the rest of Hair, it just doesn’t travel. Despite the goodwill of this production, Hair is too ludicrously out of sync to be much more than post-modern space junk. Instead of provoking a spark of renewed vitality it only signals further cynicism.
The Adelaide Review, September, 1992.