Hair Dazzles Broadway

Walter McBride / Retna Ltd. Acid redux! The Hair revival opened on Broadway last night, and is newly relevant in a post-Obama America. Lee Siegel reports on the protest musical, and how we are still in the Age of Aquarius.

That “populist revolt,” which you hear about in the media, but which no one has actually seen, is finally breaking out in New York City on a near-nightly basis. It’s called Hair, takes place in a theater, not in the streets, and is driven by opposition to the Vietnam War, hypocritical adults, organized religion, racism, and pollution, and by a passionate defense of sex and drugs.

In other words, the 1968 Broadway production of Hair is being revived on Broadway in 2009 at a time when every issue that animated the play has been—in the musical’s own perspective—happily resolved. There is almost universal opposition to the war in Iraq, the “Generation Gap” has been replaced by parents jostling with their children for space on Facebook, our president is black, and just about everybody is “green.” As for sex and drugs... well, go refill your prescription and I’ll get mine, let’s email each other some pictures of ourselves naked, and if we both like what we see, why don’t we meet for a drink later tonight.

Hair tells us that though technology might well have divided us, there is a primal human need to be physically attached to great emotions and high ideals.

And yet so far, audiences and critics love the revival—and when it ran for a short time at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park last summer as part of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park series, crowds gathered at dawn to get tickets. It’s a puzzle, all right. Why Hair? And why now?

A little bit of history: Though its nudity and frank adversarialism provoked controversy when the musical first opened, Hair appeared at a time when the counterculture and its commercial assimilation were happening simultaneously. Just one year later, in 1969, Oh! Calcutta! and Dionysus in ’69 both opened off-Broadway, but the former was headed for Broadway—where it landed three years later—while the latter, to this day, could never be assimilated by any theater north of 14th street.

Kenneth Tynan’s Oh! Calcutta! replaced Hair’s youthful idealism with sophisticated irony and cynicism, and instead of merely showing nudity, it portrayed naked actors simulating sex on stage. Richard Schechner, The Performance Group's producer and director, offered up a loose adaptation of Euripides’ Bacchae with Dionysus in ‘69—and it was even more graphic in its portrayal of nudity and sex, untamed by anything like polish and sophistication. Hair, with its singable, soulful melodies and its sentimental storyline—make love, not war—and with its assault on its audiences’ unexamined values, smoothly fused middle-class with outlaw sentiments. Nowadays, when radical pieties about sex and society have merged almost completely into commercial pieties about same, Hair is the perfect entertainment for audiences that are both gratified and discontent.

Then, too, America, with its short history, is in love with the past, and the “revival” is a national style. From retro ovens, clothes and furniture, to the endless recycling of the past into entertainment—Milk, Frost/Nixon—to proliferating family dynasties in politics and Hollywood, we use culture to create the illusion of immortality. No style or personality, it seems, dies that cannot be revived in one form or another.