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“Hair” came directly from Greenwich Village — Joseph Papp’s Off-Broadway Public Theater — a couple of blocks away from the real hippies changing the world down in Washington Square. “Hair” had no real plot, it was simply a revue, showing practically every aspect of the counterculture in a variety of musical styles, dance, and stage effects. Its encyclopedic psychedelia included mind-altering drugs, pollution, the Vietnam War, civil rights, astronauts, astrology, hairstyles, Shakespeare, and the Waverly movie theater on Sixth Avenue.
Awards and honors
Activated by tightly integrated video and lighting schema (via Patrick W. Lord and Jason Lyons), the frame can make the evening feel like a shared hallucination unfolding inside one of Peter Max’s lunchbox radios. 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 director Diane 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.
Yes, the messy musical ‘Hair’ can still be fun and relevant in 2024
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Although she wishes it was Claude's baby, she was "knocked up by some crazy speed freak". The tribe link together LBJ (President Lyndon B. Johnson), FBI (the Federal Bureau of Investigation), CIA (the Central Intelligence Agency) and LSD ("Initials"). Six members of the tribe appear dressed as Claude's parents, berating him for his various transgressions – he does not have a job, and he collects "mountains of paper" clippings and notes. They say that they will not give him any more money, and "the army'll make a man out of you", presenting him with his draft notice.
Original Broadway production
This scaffolding was decorated with found objects that the cast had gathered from the streets of New York. These included a life-size papier-mâché bus driver, the head of Jesus, and a neon marquee of the Waverly movie theater in Greenwich Village.[99] Potts' costumes were based on hippie street clothes, made more theatrical with enhanced color and texture. Some of these included mixed parts of military uniforms, bell bottom jeans with Ukrainian embroidery, tie dyed T-shirts and a red white and blue fringed coat.[99] Early productions were primarily reproductions of this basic design. You know the big songs — “Aquarius,” “Let the Sunshine In,” “Good Morning Starshine” — and the Signature Theatre cast, backed by Angie Benson’s bangin’ eight-piece band, sells them with all the heart and the lung power you’d expect in a spring-tentpole production from an American musical-theater powerhouse. The physical staging more than measures up, too, with costumes by Kathleen Geldard so apt they might be made entirely of hemp and patchouli, plus a jam-packed set (by Paige Hathaway) that compresses the proceedings toward the audience.
Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of Hair
Claude returns from the induction center, and tribe members act out an imagined conversation from Claude's draft interview, with Hud saying "the draft is white people sending black people to make war on the yellow people to defend the land they stole from the red people". Claude gives Woof a Mick Jagger poster, and Woof is excited about the gift, as he has said he's hung up on Jagger. Three white women of the tribe tell why they like "Black Boys" ("black boys are delicious ..."), and three black women of the tribe, dressed like The Supremes, explain why they like "White Boys" ("white boys are so pretty ..."). Hair tells the story of the "tribe", a group of politically active, long-haired hippies of the "Age of Aquarius" living a bohemian life in New York City and fighting against conscription into the Vietnam War. Claude, his good friend Berger, their roommate Sheila and their friends struggle to balance their young lives, loves and the sexual revolution, with their rebellion against the war and their conservative parents and society. Ultimately, Claude must decide whether to resist the draft as his friends have done, or to serve in Vietnam, compromising his pacifist principles and risking his life.
Tony Award for Best
He declares himself "president of the United States of Love" ("Colored Spade"). In a fake English accent, Claude says that he is "the most beautiful beast in the forest" from "Manchester, England". A tribe member reminds him that he's really from Flushing, New York ("Manchester England"). Hud, Woof and Berger declare what color they are ("I'm Black"), while Claude says that he's "invisible". Four African-American tribe members recite street signs in symbolic sequence ("Dead End").
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Tribe members Sheila, a New York University student who is a determined political activist, and Berger, an irreverent free spirit, cut a lock of Claude's hair and burn it in a receptacle. After the tribe converges in slow-motion toward the stage, through the audience, they begin their celebration as children of the Age of Aquarius ("Aquarius"). Interacting with the audience, he introduces himself as a "psychedelic teddy bear" and reveals that he is "looking for my Donna" ("Donna"). In Stellar Blade, EVE can choose between 13 unique hairstyles, each available in four colors that often range from black, brown, blonde, blue, red, or even green. This cosmetic guide details everything you need to know about hairstyles, including how to access the hairstyle, how much each hairstyle will set you back, and their available colors. So even in a first-class commercial revival like the 2007 Diane Paulus staging that started in Central Park and later played the Kennedy Center on its way around the nation, “Hair” can feel like an exercise in diminishing returns.
He observes the hippies panhandle from a trio of horseback riders, including Short Hills, New Jersey debutante Sheila Franklin ("Sodomy"), and later catches and mounts a runaway horse, which the hippies have rented, exhibiting his riding skills to Sheila ("Donna"), before then returning the horse to Berger, who offers to show him around. 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. And for much of the show, it’s that reciprocally supportive camaraderie that makes the musical feel so alive.
Musical
“Hair” became internationally famous for a brief, dimly lit scene at the end of the first act when the entire company assembled in the nude. Thirteen songs were added between the production at the Public Theater and Broadway, including "I Believe in Love".[115] "The Climax" and "Dead End" were cut between the productions, and "Exanaplanetooch" and "You Are Standing on My Bed" were present in previews but cut before Broadway. 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.
The Public Theater reunited tribe members from the Central Park presentation and revival for a 50th anniversary benefit October 25, 2017. The show’s nudity made it a first for a Broadway musical when it transferred uptown on April 29, 1968, as did its full rock score. “The American Tribal Love Rock Musical” reached parents who were curious about their kids and the kids themselves, who were compelled by the music. Although “Hair” did not produce the immediate revolution in Broadway music that critics had predicted, it did run nearly 2,000 performances and was the beginning of a diversification in the musical styles of the Broadway score. Steel Burkhardt began a four-year journey with Hair as a Tribe member in the 2007 Central Park concerts, followed by the 2008 full production in the park, the 2009 Broadway revival and 2010 London transfer. He moved up to the leading role of Berger in the show’s national tour and returned to Broadway in the summer of 2011.
The sonic explosion of “Aquarius” opens the proceedings with a sense of searchingly honest wonder, and the downright hymn-like ecstatics of “Let the Sunshine In” send the audience out feeling like it’s been taken properly to church, dubious as “Hair’s” counterculture warriors might feel about the simile. In between, though, those lesser tunes come and go without much impact, and the ‘60s-flavored shots they take at the mid-century monoculture don’t feel as tart as they once must have. 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.
The tribe moves in front of Claude as Sheila and Dionne take up the lyric. The whole tribe launches into "Let the Sun Shine In", and as they exit, they reveal Claude lying down center stage on a black cloth. During the curtain call, the tribe reprises "Let the Sun Shine In" and brings audience members up on stage to dance.
In Robert Anderson’s 1953 drama “Tea and Sympathy,” a young college student suspected of being gay asks a friend to show him how to walk like a real man. Vogel turns that notoriously homophobic scene inside out when Carl shows his sister how to walk like a man to protect herself from unwanted sexual advances. Later, Phyllis, aghast at her daughter’s appearance, shows Martha how to walk like a real woman. Most similar between “Mother Play” and “The Glass Menagerie” are the ways in which Phyllis and Amanda batter their respective sons, Carl (Jim Parsons) and Tom, about where they go at night. Since it’s the late 1960s and beyond in “Mother Play,” Phyllis doesn’t hold back to express her revulsion, using just about every gay slur there is in Webster’s. As the play’s full title would suggest, “Mother Play” does not take place over the period of a few days but rather a few decades as this family of three moves in and out of several apartments.
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