Word: broadway
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...never saw the original production of Hair, but I did catch the show a couple of years after its 1968 Broadway debut, when the touring company came to San Francisco. I was a student at Berkeley, and I would occasionally take a break from dodging tear gas in Sproul Plaza to usher for plays in the city. It was a good deal: students could spend half an hour helping fat cats find their way to their orchestra seats and, after the curtain went up, take any empty seat for free. Except that the night I saw Hair, the house...
Well, maybe not quite. But allow a baby boomer his memories. (To be honest, I probably didn't call them fat cats either.) And allow Hair--or so even some professed fans of the show have pleaded--to remain in the mists of '60s nostalgia. After a flop 1977 Broadway revival and a not-much-more-successful 1979 movie version directed by Milos Forman, the feeling seemed to harden that the Age of Aquarius was over and trying to bring it back would look hopelessly out of touch, even silly, in this cynical new millennium...
...Expanded from a concert version that ran for a weekend last September, the revival is being produced by the city's Public Theater, Joseph Papp's downtown theater lab that first opened its doors in 1967 with Hair. It is returning on the 40th anniversary of the show's Broadway debut. All the tickets, fittingly, are free. Most folks queue up on the Internet now (for seats chosen by lottery) rather than stand in line all day long, but it's the hottest ticket in New York City...
Efforts over the past few years to mount a major revival had foundered on disagreements among the show's creators over whether and how it ought to be changed. Michael Butler, producer of the original Broadway show, has favored a faithful rendering, and his production in Los Angeles last year was well received. But Hair's surviving co-author, James Rado, who conceived and wrote the show in 1967 with Gerome Ragni (who died of cancer in 1991), has been more indulgent of changes--adding, subtracting and tinkering with the show in spurts over the years--and he has given...
Rado and Ragni were off-broadway actors and part of the downtown experimental-theater scene in the mid-'60s when they decided to write a musical that would express the new attitudes of the youth culture exploding around them: sexual experimentation, an openness to drugs, the rejection of middle-class values of all kinds and most of all a hatred for the Vietnam War. The creative process reflected this freewheeling, convention-defying spirit. To cast the show, Rado and Ragni scoured the streets of Greenwich Village for people with the right look. Early performances had an anarchic, anything-goes feel...