HAIR

Finally saw HAIR this weekend for my Recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic-Partner, Adam’s birthday. All that hair, and I still can’t get married in the state of New York or California?

Woodstock, Monterey, you name it. Be-IN, Love-IN, Freedom, Happiness?

Okay, to the play. I love the music. I do. And the play, basically, is about a bunch of kids who want to be kids and don’t want to go to war to get killed. And who can blame them? WHAT ON EARTH WAS VIETNAM? I mean, really. When I was a kid, it was just a strange word. Hippies were everywhere. My cousin who was living with us in the suburbs of New York did come back from Woodstock covered with mud in her green Volkswagon. So the lore goes.

The cast of HAIR was sublime. One of the great things about overpopulation is it does create more and more talented people who have to compete even harder for fewer spots on earth. By the time someone gets to sing on Broadway, they have completely risen past the ranks of the medium good, the very good, and the best. It’s quite something.

Directed by Diane Paulus (I’m a big fan), this play was a big romp, the cast in the audience, clothes off at intermission, hippie vaudeville, great movement, solid humor, and the singing, as I’ve said.

For me, the show was pretty much about golden voiced Gavin Creel. I would say this is because I am a letch, if I thought Gavin was still a kid…but of course, like most musicals, the kids are being played by full blown adults. This is something I don’t love. Mostly because a younger cast might still be full of rage and piss. Older professionals, you can tell they are pounding through their careers and this is one of their stops along the way. Tant pis pour eux! We get to enjoy their talent. And, well, if they do look like current day well-taken-care-of American kids---it’s not their fault. I do wonder, though, if they really get what they’re doing. I bet the old folks of the Seventeenth Century probably thought the Hamlet of 1660 was just not that authentic.

The music of Galt MacDermot is the star here. It is one amazing song after another, as we all know. I especially like the long pieces in Act 2 from Black Boys to White Boys to Walking in Space all the way through Ain’t Got No.

I remember my Uncle Gene had the record when I was a kid and my parents wouldn’t let me listen to it. In college, I was cast in the play which was performed at Harvard’s Kennedy Center---I dropped out because it was pretty silly and shoddy (with an updated script by a student---making most of the action all flashback. Songs cut, etc.) Then as a youngster in New York---I was cast in a European tour…as the understudy of Berger, during the Christmas break. I didn’t do it. How can I be away from my American Christians at Christmas? Alas, I was never in the play and have contented myself with banging the songs out on the piano for years on end.



If you come to New York and you want to hear some amazing music in a sharp, polished production, head on over to HAIR. It’s solid.