Untangling The Revival of Hair

Forty-one years after it first opened in Central Park's Delacorte Theater, Hair is back in all of its crunchy, anarchical grandeur. Yes, those are actual crickets in the background, and the sound is at least as soothing to the ears as Gerome Ragni's and James Rado's score heard recently on an oldies radio station near you. They're still monumental-sounding although the fact that, in four decades, "Let the Sunshine In" and "Aquarius" have become synonymous with the flower-child era, has clearly helped free the big-voiced tribe from a lot of the heavy lifting required of their 1967 predecessors. And that's not only the case with the music.

Fact is, everything Hair had going for it the first time around is still there. Thanks to the idyllic venue and the talented cast, it may be even better. Christopher J. Hanke (who had just replaced Jonathan Groff as Claude) is a hippie after Mom's own heart – a clean-cut, non-threatening pretty boy with a voice for the choir. Kacie Sheak is perfect as ditzy, pregnant Jeanie who whines "How come you never call me?" to which Claude replies "Come on, Jeanie, you know you don't have a phone." Andrew Kober steals the show in drag, as the hopelessly-unhip Margaret Mead. She treats the "tribe" as literal research subjects, and ironically gets the most laughs playing an archetype of musical theater in a show that strives so hard to be nontraditional.

Case in point: "Black Boys/White Boys," always a silly, titillating circus of a song, now comes off as even more tangential to the plot than it did before, if that's even possible. And it seems almost unnecessary to mention that Woof's (Bryce Ryness) "Sodomy" and "Colored Spade," ("I'm a jungle bunny/Jigaboo coon/Pickaninny mau mau") designed by the composers to be the show's marquee bust-out-the-smelling-salts numbers, doesn't rise above the level of your average HBO comedy special. And the nudity? Oh, right, the nudity. Don't look for it to slap you across the face; they're not out cavorting in a grassy meadow like a bunch of horny Greek satyrs. It is, in fact, a rather solemn, deliberate affair.

The cast, not ones to risk being overshadowed by the incredible musicians behind them, strives to show their versatility in other ways. One of the tribe members kills in a sequence portraying Berger's (Will Swenson) school administrator as cartoonish World War II-era Nazi stereotype. In fact, some of the best comedic material comes from the skill with which the cast lampoons various revered figures of their own era and before (Abe Lincoln, Aretha Franklin). News flash: these kids are funny. It's just that most of the time they're taking themselves so damn seriously, which is a liberty the audience doesn't have. We can't completely give ourselves up to it. We know too much. It's sponsored by Bank of America, for crying out loud, and that guy next to you just got his camera confiscated by a couple of sellout Public Theater narcs. So if Hair no longer works as agitprop, and the shock value wore off long ago, what's left?

A revival. No different from South Pacific, or, god help us, Damn Yankees. A 1967 time capsule that, for lack of a better term, simply is what it is. Let's face it: the counterculture anthems made hits by the likes of The 5^th Dimension and The Cowsills have become living clichés populate Judd Apatow gross-out comedies, the tribe's beaded, buckskinned wardrobe as cookie-cutter stereotypical as that "hippie" costume your 11-year-old niece wore trick-or-treating last October.

Disheartening as it all sounds, it's probably for the best. For too long, Hair, more than any other musical, has been unfairly expected to "mean" something, simply because at the time it was written it purported to speak for an era that arguably did more than any other to shape the way we live now. Director Diane Paulus, in interviews, has even tried to link the show's revival to the Obama campaign. Laugh if you like, but anyone who walks into the Delacorte with this mindset, then really stops to look around him or her at what this so-called "show of a generation" has become, will probably walk out even more bitter than they went in. And that would be shame, because Hair, despite it all, was, and still is, great theater.

- Claire Shefchik