Hair Dazzles Broadway

After all, another revival of a great American musical is now taking place right down the street from Hair. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s West Side Story has been drawing crowds and raking in the bucks, even in this battered economy, for weeks. Like Hair, West Side Story is also emblematic of its age. Opening in 1957, it tackled the reality of ethnic strife at a time when America’s self-image as a “melting pot” was beginning to be exposed as a something like a myth. Its tragic ending is really a type of hopefulness; the very fact of love between Tony and Maria means that the social conflicts that kept them apart will shortly be healed.

Hair ends on the same upbeat note, though the new production seems to have replaced the original Broadway production’s upbeat ending with the original off-Broadway version’s grimmer conclusion (from what I understand, Claude, who has been drafted, lives in the upbeat version and dies in the darker one). As the cast sings “Let the Sunshine In” around Claude’s lifeless body, you feel that sunshine—a new harmonious age—is right around the corner. The idea, presented by both musicals, that the crisis-ridden present will eventually become a peaceful and happy past, celebrated on stage and in song, has an obvious appeal. It reminds us that we’ve won before, just when we feel that we’re losing now.

But the most heartening thing about Hair’s contemporary appeal and apparent success was foreseen by the play’s creators. For Hair is, perhaps most of all, about the original communal power of theater itself. At a moment when people who work in or simply love the theater are worrying—along with just about everybody else in every other industry and medium—that the digital age is making the stage obsolete, this musical makes the opposite statement.

Hair tells us that though technology might well have divided us to the point that claims of “populist revolt” seem like absurd fabrications, there is a primal human need to be physically attached to great emotions and high ideals. It tells us that true protest and true affirmation are the stuff of culture, and that culture is made by individuals but shared and understood by communities—and that in the midst of economic and political despair, an artistic Renaissance might well be just around the corner. Now, if only someone would write a soaring, searing, exuberant musical about what we are living through today, rather than what happened over 40 years ago.

Lee Siegel has written about culture and politics and is the author of three books: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination; Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television; and, most recently, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob. In 2002, he received a National Magazine Award for reviews and criticism.