[4 articles]
'Hair' shocks audience
http://www.collegian.psu.edu/archive/2010/04/09/hair_shocks_audience.aspx
April 9, 2010
By Chidi Ugwu
Aretha Franklin, Scarlett O'Hara, Abraham Lincoln and John Wilkes
Booth sharing a stage isn't the strangest scene in the Penn State
Thespians production of the musical Hair.
The show's first performance of the year took place Thursday night
and it seemed as though each and every audience member was enthralled
by the show in the Schwab Auditorium.
The night was full of laughs, gasps and tears mostly as a result of
the performance's powerful musical numbers.
Within the first five songs, the audience had witnessed the one
character take off his pants and sing in a loincloth, and was treated
with odes to sodomy and various drugs. Even by today's standards, the
subject matter of some songs sounded a little outlandish, but still
managed to entertain, shock and excite the audience
The cast remained energetic throughout the entire show, often jumping
around the stage and running up and down the aisles, tousling the
hair of random audience members and passing out flyers for a Be-In.
"I think the cast did a great job at capturing the spirit of the
'60s," Stephanie Noga (junior-kinesiology) said. "They were good at
switching from upbeat to serious."
A pivotal scene in the musical was originally meant to have nudity,
but changes were made late in the process after the crew was told by
the administration that the nudity would not be allowed, said Ryan
Howell (senior-theater design and technology), who played the part of
the male lead, Berger.
Even with its fun feel, the musical often deals with serious themes
of personal freedom and self-expression in a society that would
prefer otherwise.
In one scene, all the males on stage toss their draft cards into a
flame as a means of rebelling against a system they see as being
entirely unfair.
Even though the musical was spawned from social turmoil of more than
40 years ago, Kayla Larkin thinks there is still a lesson to be
learned from it today.
She said the last scene especially moved her, and really drove home
the message of the play.
"If I had stared at that coffin for much longer, I would've started
crying," she said. "The image was so powerful."
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Hair - See it at all costs!
http://www.uktheatretickets.co.uk/article/19721254/Hair---See-it-at-all-costs!
Don't miss out on seeing Hair this spring, one publication has urged.
Wednesday, 14 April 2010
London theatre fans have been urged to buy Hair tickets as soon as
they can in order to catch one of this year's biggest theatre events.
The musical opens tonight (April 14th 2010) at the Gielgud Theatre
and the Drama Student magazine said the show is sure to blow your mind.
"[Hair is a] celebration of life, a love letter to freedom and a
passionate cry for hope and change," it said.
The publication also added that the show's songs - which include Age
of Aquarius and Let the Sun Shine - are some of the greatest ever to
be performed on a stage.
Its writer joked: "Beg, borrow or steal a ticket at all costs!"
Hair will mark the first time that the entire cast of a Broadway show
has transferred to London for the UK version.
It was originally written in the 1960s and covers themes such as the
Vietnam War and the Summer of Love via a group of friends living in New York.
Time magazine called the 2008 revival of the show "as daring as ever".
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Hair, restored
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8617000/8617715.stm
13 April 2010
By Andrew Walker
Hair, the groundbreaking 1960s "tribal love-rock musical", reopens in
London's West End tonight in a revival co-produced by Sir Cameron Mackintosh.
--
Its controversial London premiere, on Friday 27 September 1968,
coincided with the ending of more than two centuries of stage
censorship - one of the great cultural watersheds of that most
tumultuous of decades.
According to its best-known song, Hair arrived on the scene at the
"dawning of the age of Aquarius", a mythical era which would usher in
universal peace, love and understanding. The reality could not have
been further from the truth.
1967, that fabled "summer of love" which saw The Beatles serenade a
live worldwide television audience of 400 million with All You Need
Is Love, had morphed into something much darker and visceral.
The "Prague Spring", a blossoming of liberalisation born in
Czechoslovakia in January 1968, was crushed by the tanks of Soviet
bloc that August.
Elsewhere, students around Europe revolted in May, most notably in
Paris. US involvement in Vietnam was by now a full-scale war and the
assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy signified to
many the end of a youthful dream.
Throughout all this, though, London's West End sailed on, as stately
and unswerveable as an ocean liner. The land of such smash-hit,
family-friendly musicals as My Fair Lady, Salad Days and South
Pacific was impervious to the changing times and mores. Or so it seemed.
Hair, written by out-of-work actors Gerome Ragni and James Rado, had
debuted in New York the previous December.
With scenes containing nudity and drug-taking as well as its strong
anti-war message and the desecration of the American flag on stage,
few would have expected it to grace London's Shaftesbury Avenue.
And the chances of Hair making a successful West End transfer were
lengthened even more by the censorship regime which still existed in Britain.
Since 1737, when prime minister Sir Robert Walpole introduced new
rules in order to curb anti-government satires, all plays had to be
passed by the Lord Chamberlain before they could be performed in a
public theatre.
'Manifestly high-spirited'
But the appearance of Hair coincided with dramatic changes in British
society. 1967 had seen two hugely significant pieces of legislation -
partially decriminalising homosexual acts between men aged 21 or over
and legalizing abortion - reach the statute book.
And, following a decades-long campaign, supported by luminaries
including George Bernard Shaw and John Osborne, parliament finally
abolished stage censorship.
The Theatres Act, which came into effect the day before Hair opened
at the Shaftesbury Theatre, did away with the Lord Chamberlain, who
had already banned three prior versions of the musical.
Indeed, one censor had reported that the show "extols dirt,
anti-establishment views, homosexuality, free love and inveighs
against patriotism".
Although playwrights now had much more latitude, they were still
liable to be prosecuted for strong language and obscenity.
The most controversial scene in Hair involved the cast emerging
entirely naked from under a vast sheet. Tom O'Horgan, who directed
that London production, said: "I think that the famed nude scene has
been greatly over-emphasised.
"It has very little importance in the show itself and much of the
publicity has obscured the important aspects of the play, which are
also perhaps shocking to people because they deal with things as they
are. We tell it the way it is."
In Britain, as in the United States, Hair opened to mixed reviews.
Drama critic Irving Wardle, writing in The Times, said: "Nothing else
remotely like it has yet struck the West End. Its honesty and passion
give it the quality of a true theatrical celebration - the joyous
sound of a group of people telling the world exactly what they feel."
The Guardian's Philip Hope-Wallace, wrote that the climax of the
first act was "a subliminal but quite effective tableau of nudes,
frontal female and male.
"I can well imagine some scandalised reactions, but possibly more to
the blasphemy (conventional), rude words (the usual), and even
perhaps to the general anti-Americanism of what is plotless, but not
quite witless and manifestly high spirited, even if in a rather
boringly exhibitionist anti-authoritarian manner."
And The Telegraph's critic, the 78 year-old WA Darlington, wrote that
he had "tried hard", but found the evening "a complete bore". Others
disagreed: the London production ran for 1,997 performances until 1973.
--------
Hair: The Broadway Reviews
http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/spooners/naimakhan-6622/hair-the-broadway-reviews-2628/
14 April, 2010
by: Naima Khan
What did the US Broadway critics make of Hair last year? And what
have UK bloggers made of it's West End run so far?
--
The American rock musical Hair opens at Geilgud Theatre this week and
has so far had positive reviews from British theatre bloggers. The
entire Broadway company of the Tony award-winning show has been
transferred to London's West End bringing with it the anthemic songs
of anti-war '60s USA as it undergoes its sexual revolution.
In light of ongoing debate over the place and power of traditional
newspaper critics, we thought we'd take a look at what the Broadway
critics made of the show while it was State-side and salute our
valued UK bloggers while we're at it.
Joe Dzienmianowicz of New York Theatre Guide gave it four stars and
admitted "this wasn't half as bad as I thought it was going to be".
Whilst warning us not to expect much of a story he does say something
for the formal setting that would certainly apply to the West End:
"seeing a bunch of kids in rags, tie-dyed t-shirts, and flowing
cotton dresses on the stage of a Broadway theatre is a visual mind
bender". He also takes his hat off to director Dianne Paulus'
"exuberant staging" for letting it "all hang out".
Ben Brantly of The New York Times hailed the seeming spontaneity of
Karole Armitage's "happy hippie choreography, with its group gropes
and mass writhing", declaring the show "a feel-good free-for-all".
The New York Post highlighted the "breathtaking precision and
conciseness" dispatched by the cast as they spoofed "Tin Pan Alley,
country and doo-wop along with hazy psychedelic explorations, folk
ballads and full-on rock anthems", calling the show a production that
"throbs with life".
Elysa Gardner of USA Today reminded us that this production is no
guaranteed success: "like its very young, Vietnam-era characters, the
story has more energy than focus. In the wrong hands, it can easily
become a quaint, cloying mess. What director Diane Paulus and her
flawless cast have achieved is a testament to the indomitability and
transience of youth, with all the blissful exuberance and aching
poignance that entails."
This side of the pond, musical lovers seem to have few complaints
either. Hair received a five star review from Gari Davies who found
it "a hippy playground simply put, no matter where you're sat,
you're fodder for the cast to come and play with you". He regarded
the staging itself as "revolutionary".
Luke Murphy of 2's A Company however, came away slightly more
confused. He acknowledged all the elements of a good musical
including an undeniably strong cast, but concluded: "While I didn't
particularly like the show, I was wishing that I was on stage with
the cast...I did enjoy Hair. I just didn't enjoy it as much as I feel
I should have."
With the relevance of the newspaper theatre critic up for debate, The
Stage have launched a survey to gauge public opinion on the sway that
critics have (or perhaps no longer do) on audience attendance. They
have acknowledged, though perhaps not fully, that the blogoshpere has
an increasingly loud voice, whether read for entertainment or
critical regard. Andrew Lloyd Webber recently added his voice by
expressing his fears over "all this stuff on the net" and the effect
bloggers have during previews. Hair is one of the upcoming shows
whose box office rating will go some way to further questioning
whether blogs pose a threat to the traditional theatre critic.
.
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