[Mb-hair] HAIR-London TIMES review

[RJ Mac]

Yikes, sounds awful.  Claude-with-Playstation.  Hmmm.
and Berger with what, an Ipod...?
Maybe Sheila, instead of leading the protest march,
sits down and cc's e-mail petitions across the globe
in a single stroke.  

I'm curious: Was these changes due to a re-write by
the author(s) or a directorial enhanceement?

rj
--- Michael Butler <michael at michaelbutler.com> wrote:

> 
> September 23, 2005
> 
> Times2
> 
> Hair
> Benedict Nightingale at Gate Theatre, W11
> 
> THIS show ‹ meaning the original Hair, not last
> night¹s ineptly updated
> version ‹ was a big deal when it hit London 35 years
> ago.
> 
> That was partly because its portrait of stoned
> hippies brandishing their
> unshorn locks at American society had made it a cult
> in New York, but mainly
> because we had just dispatched the censor to the
> knacker¹s and were at long
> last free to see its famous nude scene.
> 
> Here, let me inject a personal memory. Halfway
> through Galt Macdermot¹s
> ³tribal musical² I whispered to a colleague, ³When
> is the nude scene
> coming?², and he replied, ³It¹s just happened². So
> for me Hair will for ever
> mark the time when I realised I needed specs.
> 
> At the tiny Gate there¹s no danger of missing what
> is, in 2005, a pretty
> standard display of bobbing genitalia. Indeed, one
> would only have to reach
> out a hand in anger to end several men¹s hopes of
> fatherhood. What¹s odd,
> though, is that the second such display is meant to
> evoke the human pyramids
> at Abu Ghraib. A musical that was once a protest
> against Vietnam has moved
> to the Iraq era, complete with a poorly caricatured
> Bush and a spoof
> sergeant who tells the anti-hero to ³get your ass
> out there and fight those
> sand-niggers².
> 
> It doesn¹t work, least of all in the handling of
> that anti-hero, Charles
> Aitken¹s spindly Claude. This time he isn¹t the
> hapless victim of a policy
> that was forcing young men into the killing fields.
> Rather, he volunteers
> for the army, one moment sneering over his
> PlayStation at parents who want
> him to get a job, the next bewildering his fellow
> dropouts by telling them
> that he¹s about to defend democracy.
> 
> I was bewildered too, despite a new ending and a
> dream sequence in which
> Claude twigs what he¹s doing. The hippies in general
> have become more
> aggressive and confident, which is fine when
> energetic dancing or singing is
> needed, but stops us seeing them as the baffled,
> vulnerable youngsters they
> were meant to be. A musical about a lost generation
> has become one about
> brash layabouts exercising their inalienable right
> to smoke dope, sing songs
> about love and refuse to grow up.
> 
> Starting with that hummable ode to Aquarius, some of
> those songs still have
> zing. But evoking a zombie Establishment by dressing
> actors in judicial
> robes, plus plastic headdresses that can¹t decide if
> they¹re hair-curlers or
> coal buckets, is just one of several errors.
> Moreover, the hippies¹ flowing
> locks, like their clothes, have succumbed to spare
> modernity. This is a Hair
> without hair, which is no Hair at all.
> 
> Box-office: 020-7229 0706
> 
>     
> 
> 
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> 
> 
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