Johan Persson, ATG Tickets
HAIR THE MUSICAL, , Director - Jonathan O’Boyle, Lighting - Bem M Rogers, Choreographer - William Whelton, Designer - Maeve Black, New Wimbledon Theatre, London, UK, 2019, Credit: Johan Persson
It’s short on plot and characterisation – but boy, the songs are good! Simon Collins takes a trip back to the 60s with love-rock musical Hair at New Wimbledon Theatre...
OUR VERDICT
In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Hair revived now for a national tour, was a must-see landmark, a be-in cultural event in an era of numerous cultural landmarks: Neil Armstrong on the moon, Sgt Pepper, Cuba, Martin Luther King’s speeches, the Kennedy assassinations, Greenpeace, Woodstock, bra burning, the black panthers, the anti-war marches. Every month fresh amazement.
It was as plain as day to two young New York actors, James Rado and Gerome Ragni, that they should make a happening out of this juncture in history. Put the counter-culture on stage. They did this in a random fashion but somehow it coalesced and became a hit.
Hair is the Cultural Revolution made as a musical, as much a happening as a show. At the end, the audience is invited onto the stage to groove to the rhythms. Last night many went up, the rest of us danced where we stood.
There is a scant story. A dozen hippies are living as a tribe in a commune in the bohemian East Village area of Manhattan. Little vignettes introduce the individuals, each generating an exuberant song and dance. It is happy, innocent entertainment from young actors putting on a show reflecting their own generation. They banter in hippie slang referencing then-current issues and demonstrate their freedom to swear, erotically cavort, swap partners. At the end of Act I, they strip off and stand singing naked on the stage. In Wimbledon? Though tame by today’s standards, the show was banned in England until the theatre censorship law was changed in late September 1968.
It really seemed to those who were young then that the new Age of Aquarius was dawning. The staid conservatism and hypocrisy of post-war America was yielding to a more authentic, spontaneous way of being, one that enabled free expression and free love (facilitated by the pill), with spiritual depths from the mystic East to replace the shallow materialism and violent minds of the squares, those normals of the silent, desperate majority wearing suits and crew cuts who slept loveless in the paranoid embrace of nuclear families.
The squares in Congress voted on bombing Vietnam, sending two million soldiers there to kill or be killed, and they might put your name on the list to fight. 60,000 soldiers would die in America’s greatest military defeat, and as many would return irreparably injured, leaving in their wake three million Vietnamese dead, and a land soaked in chemical weapons.
ATG Tickets
HAIR THE MUSICAL, , Director - Jonathan O’Boyle, Lighting - Bem M Rogers, Choreographer - William Whelton, Designer - Maeve Black, New Wimbledon Theatre, London, UK, 2019, Credit: Johan Persson
Instead, you could illegally burn your draft card, drop out, turn on and tune in, live in a squat, assemble your own urban tribe and rule without rules. Grow your hair, take some drugs, dig flower power, wear loons, and share everything while rock music provides the soundtrack of the revolution.
The original version was earnestly ushering in a more permissive society. The present young cast is differently innocent. They don’t seem aware that there was once the heft of subversion in the project, with the result that some of the audience last night thought they were watching a satirical comedy, not sobered by the ever-present evil of Vietnam. When the main character, Claude, gets his conscription letter he agonises over whether to report to the army’s induction centre. In Act II, after consuming mind-altering drugs, the tribe act out his anguished reveries. When he awakes he will decide.
There are about twenty songs and accompanying dances but hardly any narrative or attention to setting or characterisation. Whether you would enjoy it depends on whether you like those songs. For me, the entire show is made worthwhile by the final song, Let The Sunshine In, which musically succeeds in expressing sorrow for those who cannot return, defiance of the impetus to war, and the grace of spiritual understanding combined in a rousing anthem.
Venue: New Wimbledon Theatre, Wimbledon
Dates: 21 March - 30 March