I had a lot of interesting choices for what to see tonight, and the revival of "Hair" has gotten superb reviews and is making money hand over fist, so I opted for it.
You know I like musicals, and this is (after all) drawn from an era with which I am quite familiar.
My reaction was - mixed.
It's hard to pin down the problems (particularly because I appear to be the only one having them).
In the good column: it's terrifically energetic, and unusually interactive with the audience, up to and including inviting EVERYONE onto the stage for the encore.
In the mediocre column: the score is good, but not terrific. I'm not at all inclined to load a single song from this show into my iTunes library.
In the negative column, I have two things to report.
(1) on the technical side, the sound of the production is out of balance - the instruments drowned out the lyrics, to the point where the solos were scream-fests
(2) and I hate to say it, but it is dated in exactly the same way "All in the Family" is dated.
I can recall the premiere of All in the Family, and I watched that show religiously. It was a sharp blade that cut deeply and profoundly, in its day. And it had an enormous effect on the way television evolved. And the true measure of its success is that it has not aged well at all, and seems an odd parody of something that is supposed to be edgy.
I think this is my problem with Hair: it is not important, it now reads as a parody of something that was important.
I can only imagine the effect this had on musical theater in the late 1960s. A troupe (sorry, tribe) of hippies, dressed in their hippie-garb, a multi-ethnic cast, representations of protest, getting high, having sex (in every possible combination), not to mention the disrobing at the end of the first act... people must have gone bananas.
But there is no there, there. It focuses an exceptionally narrow lens on the Viet Nam war and its effects on the flower power generation, which is nominally the driver in the narrative. But except for mentioning some protests in DC, and burning draft cards, there is not much to credit these bohemians, who are still much more interested in who is going to sleep with whom than what is happening in the war. To be fair, it is set in 1967, which is before My Lai, Cambodia, Kent State... but perhaps that is part of the problem, too. It's difficult to recreate the ignorance of the past, and maybe it is me who is the wrong age and just remembers too much from the 1970s.
I understand that Hair is currently popular in high school productions (without naked 18 year-olds, I assume, although given what gets posted on the internet, it might be a poor assumption) because of its allegorical role in representing protest.
I think I would rather see today's youth actually protest, instead.
I guess I'd also prefer to see someone tackle Hair/2009, and update the thing for the protests of the day, putting a little meat on the bones of its aged corpus.
Of course, based on ticket sales, I'm in the minority. I suppose I should have just gone up on the stage at the end and waved my arms around during the reprise of "Let the Sun Shine..."
At the time, however, it all seemed rather overcast.
