An appreciation of the 1967 love-rock musical, which, against the odds, won over audiences across the world.
An appreciation of the 1967 love-rock musical, which, against the odds, won over audiences across the world.
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Why ‘Hair’ Has Endured
An appreciation of the 1967 love-rock musical, which, against the odds, won over audiences across the world.
We Are Family
Chapter 2:Reunionsand Reconsiderations
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Why ‘Hair’ Has Endured
Every now and then, a piece of American performance is so memorable that it both redefines its medium and reframes the culture at large. Here, an appraisal of one such enduring and heavily referenced work — a youth-inflected 1967 musical that captured the popular (and political) consciousness — alongside a gathering of the stars who not only made it but were made by it, too.
ByBen Brantley
ITS REPUTATION REMAINS that of a dangerous young renegade, pumped to the point of explosion with anger, hormones and mind-altering substances. But in truth, “Hair,” which opened in 1967 at New York’s Public Theater, was always a sweetheart: open-armed, open-minded, as ready to comfort as to party. Among American musicals of the late 1960s, it was the cool kid you wanted to cuddle with, even if you were no longer a kid yourself.
True, as the fame of this self-labeled “tribal love-rock musical” spread after its successful transfer to Broadway in 1968, it trailed a heady perfume of notoriety. This, after all, was a work that featured pot smoking, draft-card burning, references to a Kama Sutra of sexual practices and a host of unkempt young things singing in the nude for its first-act finale. The Acapulco, Mexico, 1969 premiere was closed by government order after its first performance. The show’s London producers cannily waited until there was a change in censorship laws to open it in 1968 in the West End. And just last year, “Hair” was removed from theschedule ofNBC’s series of live televised musicals, suggesting it still wasn’t ready for prime time.
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Yet the liberating breeze emanating from this portrait of an improvised family of acid-dropping dropouts in New York City would be felt throughout the world, with productions popping up like mushrooms in Europe, South America and Japan. And the largely middle-class audiences who might have been alarmed by the prospect of rebellious youth at the barricades discovered that it was,in the wordsof the New York Times critic Clive Barnes “so likable. … So new, so fresh, and so unassuming.”
In fact, the cast album of “Hair” was one that, as young teenagers, my friends and I were allowed to play — and dance to — in our living rooms and even on church retreats (as long as we skipped the track called “Sodomy”). Compared to the acid rock that was then flooding the airwaves,Galt MacDermot’s score — even allowing for expletive-laced lyrics by the show’s creators,Gerome Ragniand James Rado — sounded as melodic as Rodgers and Hammerstein. Its songs became Top-40 hits, covered by the likes of theCowsills(the title song) and the5th Dimension(a medley).
It had been a while since songs from Broadway shows featured on pop radio, and there was hope that “Hair” might inaugurate a new age of hipness for the American musical. That never quite happened. Its imitations (including a couple of flops involving its original creators) didn’t have the same impact, and a 1977 revival died after only 43 performances. Still, “Hair” suggested that what was regarded as an aging genre could be surprisingly accommodating to new styles and voices, even if it would be decades before a contemporary, teen-appeal musical achieved a similarly hopeful, global impact: first with “Rent,” in 1996, and later, most spectacularly, with “Hamilton,” in 2015.
IN A 1993 INTERVIEW, MacDermot said that “Hair” was not ultimately a “political show” but one “about kids having fun and making fun of things.” Though it had a loose string of a plot, about a young man afraid of being drafted for the Vietnam War, it was mostly a series of sketches in which the characters satirized their convention-bound elders and extolled the joys of sexual and pharmaceutical highs. Referring to a wildly popular 1938 revue that combined topical sketch humor with antic musical numbers, MacDermot called “Hair” the “‘Hellzapoppin’ of its generation.”
And like “Hellzapoppin,” “Hair” seemed destined to fade into that bright oblivion reserved for period novelties like Monkees albums and troll dolls. Yet when I went to see the directorDiane Paulus’s 2008 revival of the show in Central Park (which subsequently transferred to Broadway), I was surprised to discover how moved I was by it, and not just for nostalgic reasons. It was the tribal aspect of the “tribal love-rock” equation that got to me all those years later — its sense of vulnerable people banding together on the threshold of adulthood, trying to postpone their entry into the scary world that their elders had created. What little story the showdidhave, after all, pivoted on whether one of its characters would be drafted into a conflict that made the United States as rancorously divided as it has ever been in my lifetime — until now.
The divisions then often included estrangements of teenagers from their parents. So some young people wound up forming alternative clans in which you chose your own family. It’s a design for living that has been translated into both the murderous darkness of the 1960s-era Charles Manson cult and into the anodyne sitcom blitheness of the 1990s television series “Friends” or the messier 2010s-era “Girls.” The clan members of “Hair” got high together and slept together, yes, but they also nurtured, consoled and entertained one another. And for much of the show, it’s that reciprocally supportive camaraderie that makes the musical feel so alive.
What I’d forgotten, though — until I saw Paulus’s production — was the show’s awareness of its own ephemerality, its sense that tribes of youth are destined to last only as long as youth itself. “They’ll never get me,” says Berger, the de facto leader of the show’s nomadic gang. “I’m gonna stay high forever.”
But the final number in “Hair” isn’t one of its odes to defiant individualism — the title song, or “I Got Life,” or the twinkly “Good Morning Starshine.” It’s called “The Flesh Failures,” and though its subtitle is “Let the Sunshine In,” it leaves you with the feeling that darkness is fast descending — and that the tightly bound coterie at the center of “Hair” may well have scattered forever by daybreak.
Ben Brantley has been The New York Times’s co-chief theater critic since 1996. Nicholas Calcott is working on a collection of portraits of New York City artists. Photo assistants: Carlos Jaramillo and Maeve Fitzhoward. Digital tech: Chen Xiangyun.
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We Are Family
Chapter 1:Heirs andAlumni
The Artists
The Dynasties
The Directors
The Disciples
The Graduates
Chapter 2:Reunionsand Reconsiderations
The Neighbors
The Regulars
Hair (1967)
Sweeney Todd (2005 Revival)
Daughters of the Dust (1991)
Chapter 3:LegendsPioneers andSurvivors
The Renegades
The Activists
The Shadows
The Veterans
Chapter 4:The NewGuard
The Designers
The Beauties
The Scenemakers
Olivier Rousteing and Co.
Maria Cornejo and Co.
Telfar Clemens and Co.
Alessandro Michele and Co.
The Journalists