‘Hair’ sells the ’60s short
suntimes.com | Mar 11th 2011
BY HEDY WEISS Theater Critic/[email protected]
02:13AM
“Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” tries mightily to capture the
spirit of the ’60s, but there’s no Woodstock moment on stage at the Ford
Center/Oriental Theatre in Chicago. | SUN-TIMES MEDIA
Here is the strange irony of it all: It is probably a whole lot easier to
conjure the decadence and arch manners of France’s King Louis XIV and his court
on a modern stage than it is to capture the sex, drugs and draft-card-burning
hippie universe of this country in the 1960s. Both eras made theater out of
life, but there is something about the 1960s that eludes replication on any
believable level. It all just tends to turn into camp.
As Exhibit A I give you “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical,” the work
of writers Gerome Ragni and James Rado and composer Galt MacDermot that first
arrived on Broadway in 1968. It is now making a brief stop at the Ford
Center/Oriental Theatre in a national touring production based on the 2009 Tony
Award-winning Broadway revival devised to celebrate the show’s 40th anniversary.
But rather than a celebration, this take on “Hair,” directed by Harvard-based
Diane Paulus, is an almost entirely cartoonish version of the 1960s — one that
feels more like an “American Idol” interpretation of the show than a vivid
portrait of a time whose legacy (good, bad, beautiful, ugly and immensely
chaotic) can still be felt. (And I am not speaking in the abstract, either; I
was there, living in New York, and witnessed the whole thing first-hand,
including the angst of a brother with a less-than-ideal lottery number during
the Vietnam War draft era.)
Part of the problem here is from the roots up: The show’s book meanders through
the first act and only begins to coalesce midway into the second as the war
finally leaves its mark. Until then there are plenty of familiar songs, but the
staging, by Paulus and her choreographer, Karole Armitage (who seems to have
taken a cue from “Spring Awakening” rather than the 1960s), grows tedious; the
down-the-aisles movement of the actors feels tired, as does the simulated
humping, and the actors rarely move beyond the broadest caricatures.
In addition, Scott Pask’s blandly ugly set (basically just a perch for the
solid onstage band), has no “there there.” At the very least it might have
suggested Greenwich Village or Washington Square Park or even Central Park.
The story here is one of middle-class white kids mostly, and their newfound
African-American cohorts, who want to break free of the “Greatest Generation’s”
code of duty and hard work to achieve a more transcendental karma fueled by pot
(or something stronger), free love and the spiritual guidance of Hare Krishna
and Buddhism.
Berger (Steel Burkhardt) is the brash bad boy and object of desire for the
politically-minded Sheila (the dynamic but too modern Caren Lyn Tackett).
Claude (Paris Remillard, who has one of the better voices in the cast), is the
guy from Flushing, Queens, who fancies himself a Brit, ends up being drafted,
and at the crucial moment can’t go along with his pals’ draft card burning,
even though he foresees his death during a bad drug trip. (Claude’s physical
transformation from long-hair to military-ready is probably the most dramatic
moment of the show.)
The subtext of shifting race relations in some ways holds up best, with the
songs about white girls of the time trendily favoring black guys (and the
reverse), carrying a vestige of truth for the time. A minstrel show-style
episode featuring Abe Lincoln and a host of other historical characters has
some zest (led by the rich-voiced Phyre Hawkins as Dionne). And thanks to old
Will Shakespeare, “What a Piece of Work is Man” lifts everything far higher
than any inhalation of marijuana. But the grotesque savaging of pioneering
anthropologist Margaret Mead (in drag) is just embarrassing. And frankly, it is
hard to care about any of the characters in this show.
While the legacy of the 1960s is still very much with us in ways both profound
and simple, its true essence seems to have drifted into the ether, remembered
as the haze of a turbulent adolescence and little more. Even in its own time
“Hair” felt less scandalous than canned (notwithstanding the dimly lit nude
scene, the sodomy song and all the rest). And believe me, that onstage dance
party that brings audience members up onstage for the show’s love-in finale is
no Woodstock moment.
Original Page:
http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/stage/4227162-421/hair-sells-the-60s-short.html
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