[3 articles]
It's back to the age of Aquarius
http://www.examiner.co.uk/views-and-blogs/columnists/2010/04/06/denis-it-s-back-to-the-age-of-aquarius-86081-26180243/
Apr 6 2010
by Denis Kilcommons
I WAS thrilled to see that the musical Hair has been revived.
It's back in the West End and, inevitably, touring productions will
eventually take it round the country. I shall book now to avoid disappointment.
This was the show that summed up the 1960s when every teenager from
Huddersfield to Hounslow wore flowers in their hair so they could be
part of the hippy movement that started in the Haight-Ashbury
district of San Francisco.
The Beatles had launched their peace and love musical revolution a
scant 20 years since the end of the Second World War but the
philosophy of Hair took it a stage further, being outspoken about
politics and sex.
Hair featured the first totally nude scenes at the end of act one. I
was there and while the idea was exciting and liberating, the result
was a bit of a let-down. You saw more nudity in The Naked Chef.
The story is about a tribe of hippies living a bohemian life in New
York during the Age of Aquarius, whilst fighting conscription into
the Vietnam war. Echoes from the Middle East make it relevant still;
the message that youth should stand up for what they believe remains
potent, and the music is simply brilliant.
At the end, the audience were invited to join the cast on stage to
dance the night away.
This was the age when protesting students in America put flowers down
the gun barrels of National Guard soldiers sent to subdue them.
An age when it seemed, for a time, that love really could conquer
all, and that the John Lennon and Yoko Ono bed-ins for peace might
actually make a difference.
Ah well, we can all dream, and at least they tried.
Forty odd years ago, I was one of those hippy foot soldiers; I had
the Afghan coat and the beads and the hair that reached my shoulders;
I wore my jeans tucked into knee high boots and I even, on occasion,
wore flowers in my hair.
We went to parties where we turned on, tuned in and dropped out
although we usually did it with Party Sevens of Watney Bitter rather
than the lysergic acid promoted by Timothy Leary.
Ah well, to each his own.
Hair the musical has brought back wonderful memories but I have only
one reservation about going to the revival.
If all us old hippies turn up, how we will get our zimmer frames up
on the stage at the end to dance with the cast?
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"Across the Atlantic Sea": Hair, with Broadway Cast, Begins London Run
http://www.playbill.com/news/article/138361-Across-the-Atlantic-Sea-Hair-with-Broadway-Cast-Begins-London-Run
By Adam Hetrick
01 Apr 2010
The Age of Aquarius dawns in London April 1, when the Tony
Award-winning revival of the iconic 1960s rock musical Hair
boasting members of the Broadway revival cast begins performances
at the West End's Gielgud Theatre.
Officially set to open April 14, Hair arrives in London with
Tony-nominated Broadway director Diane Paulus again at the helm, with
choreography by Tony nominee Karole Armitage.
Featuring book and lyrics by the late Gerome Ragni and James Rado and
music by Galt MacDermot, the 2009 Broadway revival of Hair earned the
2009 Tony Award for Best Revival of a Musical.
Broadway cast members re-creating their work for the West End run are
Tony nominees Gavin Creel as Claude and Will Swenson as Berger, as
well as Sasha Allen as Dionne, Caissie Levy as Sheila, Allison Case
as Crissy, Kacie Sheik as Jeanie, Darius Nichols as Hud, Megan
Lawrence as Mother and Andrew Kober as Margaret Mead/Dad.
Tribe members also include Steel Burkhardt, Brianna Carlson, Matt De
Angelis, Lauren Elder, Allison Guinn, Anthony Hollock, Kevin Kern
John Moauro, Ato Blankson-Wood, Brandon Pearson, Hannah Shankman,
Maya Sharpe, Kaitlin Kiyan, Megan Reinking and Michael James Scott.
Newly added for the London cast are Luther Creek as Woof, with tribe
members Phyre Hawkins, Kevin Kern and Crystal Joy.
(View photos of the Tribe's trip in Playbill.com's "Exclusive Look at
the Hair Tribe's Journey to
London") http://www.playbill.com/news/article/138248.html
Many of the London Hair cast members have been with this incarnation
of the musical since its 2007 debut in a special 40th anniversary
concert staging at the Delacorte Theater. In 2008 the Public mounted
Hair as part of Shakespeare in the Park, where the run was extended
three times. The production transferred to Broadway's Al Hirschfeld
Theatre March 31, 2009.
The original Broadway design team includes set designer Scott Pask,
costume designer Michael McDonald, lighting designer Kevin Adams and
sound designer Acme Sound Partners.
The London production is being produced by the Public Theater with
Cameron Mackintosh and Broadway Across America.
For tickets visit HairtheMusical.co.uk.
--------
A new age of Aquarius
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/a-new-age-of-aquarius-1934754.html
Michael Coveney danced on stage at the hippie musical Hair, and his
love beads are back out for a revival
Saturday, 3 April 2010
'It was still powerful, still good, but it didn't have the joy." So
says Paul Nicholas, one of the original London cast members of Hair,
of the last London revival in the tiny Gate Theatre in Notting Hill
five years ago.
And that was the first London revival since 1993, when Michael
Bogdanov's Old Vic version, with an unknown John Barrowman as the
hippie conscript Claude, placed ushers handing out flowers in the
stalls and the cast, who wore more blue denim than kaftans, waving
condoms on stage during the mass sleep-in.
So it's clear the new celebratory production opening at the Gielgud
Theatre which comes direct from last season's New York revival in
Central Park and Broadway is asking us to tune in and turn on to a
period piece where the Vietnam war is still running, Aids is unheard
of, "masturbation can be fun" and black girls sing that "white boys
are delicious".
The "joy" thing is what I remember most about Hair, not the very
brief semi-lit full frontal nude scene at the end of the first act.
("Could you see if any of them were Jewish?" asked Jack Benny.) It
opened in London exactly one day after the Lord Chamberlain was
banned from censoring the stage (27 September 1968) and a few weeks
later, when Broadway's first (and last) "tribal love rock musical"
rolled down Shaftesbury Avenue, I got up on the stage at the end and
danced, fully clothed, with Mr Nicholas as well as Annabel Leventon,
Marsha Hunt and Peter Straker.
Well, Princess Anne and John Lennon had already clambered up there
and jigged about, so I didn't see why I shouldn't. We were all a
little bit hippie in the late 1960s: it always amused and delighted
me that the lovely Russian lady who ran the Financial Times's New
York office when I worked on the paper in the 1980s had taken over on
Broadway as the character who sings the exquisite "Frank Mills" ballad.
The original Broadway cast album had been on my gramophone turntable
in college for two terms, and I loved the songs and the music even
more than I loved Pink Floyd and the Beatles. This music, written by
a quiet, straight, Canadian church organist turned jazzer called Galt
MacDermot, was something completely new and liberating in the theatre.
Except that, as critic Mark Steyn pointed out, the Age of Aquarius
that was dawning was over by lunchtime and was only really heralding
the Age of Andrew Lloyd Webber, who took up the challenge of fusing
musical theatre with the Top 20 a little more efficiently. Hair was a
glorious mess.
Still, nothing even in Lloyd Webber surpasses the 20-minute "war"
sequence of the second act, or the rhythmically shifting setting of
Hamlet's "What a piece of work is (a) man", or the "Let the Sunshine
In" finale which moves you to tears whoever you are, and of whatever
age, Aquarian or antiquarian.
As Steyn also pointed out, this was the first Broadway show with a
hymn to anal intercourse and, even more radically, a song simply
named after a British provincial city, "Manchester, England". And if
you have trouble equating free love with stopping a war there is no
question the New York production gave a powerful and effective
platform to the Vietnam protest you just have to re-enter the
cultural bubble.
At the Gate, however, Paul Taylor in this newspaper had no problem in
suggesting that Hair's time might truly have come again, with the
resurgence of American imperialism, the waging of another unpopular
war and the replacement of LBJ with Dubya as a figure of ridicule.
There was a sinister air of coerciveness in the opening call to love;
sympathy and understanding at the Gate and the nudity came back in a
detention centre context in Abu Ghraib.
MacDermot, who is now 81 and still composing had been called into
"musicalise" the book and lyrics of a pair of drop-out chums, Gerome
Ragni (now dead) and James Rado (in his seventies). Rado played
Claude, the out-of-town patriot, and Ragni the leader of the
Greenwich Village commune; the only significant contemporary Broadway
rock musical since then, Jonathan Larson's Rent (1996), a rocked-up
La Bohème, is also populated by artistic denizens of the Village.
Quite apart from its own intrinsic merits, Hair is also historically
significant for launching (and, with the later A Chorus Line in
effect subsidising) the important Public Theater in New York, home of
many of the best American and British playwrights John Guare, Sam
Shepard, Michael Weller (who scripted the not-bad 1979 film of Hair
for Milos Forman) Caryl Churchill, David Hare under the mercurial
leadership of the director Joseph Papp (who died in 1991).
Papp was going to open the new venue with a John Arden play,
Armstrong's Last Goodnight, but suddenly decided to push through the
chaotic show Rado and Ragni were writing on the backs of envelopes.
It opened at the Public on 29 October 1967, played for a month, moved
into a Broadway club called the Cheetah and then on to Broadway, at
the Biltmore (where it stayed for five years while seven other
roadshow versions toured the US); The New York Times raved, the
Village Voice the parish paper of the cultural underground
sneered at the commercialism and crass opportunism of the enterprise,
hardly surprisingly.
The Biltmore transfer was supervised by Tom O'Horgan, a brilliant
off-Broadway director who was accused of going both upmarket and
downmarket at the same time, nice work if you can get it, and that's
the version we had here. MacDermot's score was wonderfully energised
in its anthems, its great surges of melodic declamations and
pulsating acid trips, and I always remember a hypnotic sense of
continuous nightmare, or was that the dope we scored (but didn't
inhale) in the interval, man?
At the Old Vic, one critic took exception to all the
hippie-dippiness, memorably evoking the political punch of Miss
Saigon by saying that Hair, in comparison, was like playing footsie
in a wine bar. And another dissenter said she spent so much time
watching nudity in theatres these days she was immune to mooning.
But one great underground member (sic), Jim Haynes, the American
founding editor of International Times and fringe theatre pioneer,
stayed true to the cause. In a programme note he charmingly asked:
"Can we not still and again become mirrors of each other's inner
light and illuminate the streets of London anew with love and music?"
As the streets of London were suddenly awash with cardboard box
dwellings, scroungers and muggers, the question may well have fallen
on deaf ears.
There is still a point to Hair, though if only to elucidate a period
in our semi-shared transatlantic social history, and to marvel in a
score that has never been bettered.
So Hair today may well be gone tomorrow, but its "joy" still makes
the heart sing. It led not only to Rent and another great rock
musical based on a German Expressionist play, Spring Awakening, this
year's Olivier award-winner, but also to every new musical that
struggles to sound like a rock concert and incorporate the
unquenchable spirit of youth rather than something from Stephen
Sondheim's bottom drawer.
--
Hair opens at the Gielgud Theatre, London, on 14 April
.
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