Thinking of Hair, Glorious Hair

The highlight for our Friday in Manhattan was going to see the revival of Hair.

Yes, I’m a sucker for this old chestnut. It was the first Broadway musical I ever saw, and for many years the only one. As I’ve mentioned before I saw the road version with my girlfriend in San Francisco in whatever that year was, 68, 69, somewhere in that neighborhood.

What caught me then was that it was about us! My friends and I.

Although even then my suspicions about the phenomenon were bubbling.

I already had one foot in the Zen camp and would soon jump with both feet, landing in a monastery.

Alexander Harrington’s really fine review of this revival summarizes the problems with the Hippie movement as captured in this musical succinctly.

Much of the book consists of thoughtless, adolescent mockery of authority in general, parental authority, education, the middle class, and patriotism. This was not nuanced political and social criticism in 1967, and it is even sillier now that we are half a century past the conformity and conservatism of the Eisenhower era (yes, the religious right is a major political force, yes our last president was conservative and led the country into a disastrous war, but we still live in the age of Will and Grace, rap music, and –God help us — reality television). The counter-culture/New Left’s dismissal of the horrors of communism (which can no longer be dismissed now that the files of many communist governments are open) is not only silly, it is chilling. At one point Claude’s mother (Megan Lawrence) speaks of the true secrets of Red China, and is made to seem ridiculous. Now no one can deny that in 1967 the Chinese Communists were carrying out the Cultural Revolution in which anyone who dared not to conform was humiliated, jailed, sent to forced labor, tortured, killed, or all of the above. Among the possessions Claude gives away before reporting for military duty is a Soviet flag. Yes, United States foreign policy was and is in large part very bad; yes, in 1967 segregation had just been ended legally, and the new laws were not yet fully implemented. But, as John Le Carré said, the Cold War was the war of “the very bad against the much worse.”

Intentionally or not, Hair captures the foolishness of the participants in that moment in time and space.

And their aspirations.

All the hope that births with each new generation.

And this remains a very good snapshot of mine at that moment when first separating out from what was and looking for what might be.

The production was absolutely lovely.

There’s never a wrong moment in a show that has all these young people take off their clothes at the end of the first act. Although much of the breaking of the fourth wall that was so exciting at the time seemed to me a bit much this time around. (We were in particularly wonderful seats quite near the front and in the center. Which meant the action was all around us, but we were too inaccessible to be importuned by a youth standing and grinding above our heads…)

But also the rupture of the dream of peace, love, rock ‘n roll, sex and drugs collapsed for America’s youth (in spite of Mr Harrington’s insightful view into the larger geo-political issues of the era) caught up within the morass of Vietnam’s civil war, and the seeming meaninglessness of it for our youth, was strikingly captured…

The cast, of course, are pros. And at the top of their game.

But as they stood there belting out this song, many of them were weeping.

I thought about it. Yes, they’re good actors. And they’re supposed to make me believe, they believe.

And whatever else may be true, I did.

Hamlet’s soliloquy, put to a lovely tune, continues to haunt…

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals

Ain’t it the truth?