[Mb-hair] Updating HAIR

[RJ Mac]

I was getting more and more curious about this alleged
train-wreck so I checked the web and found the
following article from the London Guardian.  (link and
article copy follows after my op-ed commentary)

I'm now a bit more sympathetic with the director,
despite that his concept apparrently did not succeed. 
It's absolutely wild and unorthodox. So was (is) the
show Hair.  ESTABLISHED works can handle attempted
innovations.  Any live performance, any time, has to
have its own life.  The text is the roadmap, the
formula to resurrect the event. Sometimes the ideas
work, sometimes no.

I've seen plenty of directorially improved
re-conceptions of established works.  (Did anyone see
the recent Broadway "Streetcar Named Desire"?  Oy.)   
So it goes up, it goes down, the loss is the
producer's, and the show continues unscathed.  Truly
powerful works manage to get their message over
however re-dressed or distorted.  

As well, opinions and reactions vary wildly.  For
example, a production of a different particular
musical, whose directorial re-imagining was highly
complimented by someone on this list, had me in fits
of exasperation.  Eh.  The show opened and closed, the
property goes on unscathed.

(Caveat: this opinion applies to Established works
only.)



http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1562210,00.html#article_continue

HAIR RESTORER
Simon Garfield
Sunday September 4, 2005
The Observer

When Daniel Kramer contacted the original writers
about a new version of the Sixties musical Hair, they
were doubtful. Then they heard his ideas for making
this classic contemporary

Hair is famous for many things and the most famous of
all is that charming young people take their clothes
off in it. Thirty-eight years after it was first
performed, a new and dramatically updated version is
about to open at the Gate Theatre in London's Notting
Hill, and just about the only thing to have survived
from the original is the prospect of still being able
to ogle smooth flesh in the name of freedom and art.
The good news is that the Gate is a very small
theatre.

Article continues
A few weeks ago, I received an email from the Gate's
artistic director, Thea Sharrock, and it contained
crushing news. I was to be allowed into rehearsals for
45 minutes one afternoon at 2.30, but 'around 3.15
they will be working on a nudity scene, so obviously
you will then be politely asked to leave'. I attended,
despite this setback, and was greeted with a scene
that anyone in their right mind would pay quite a lot
not to see - a large group of people singing 'Hare
Krishna, Hare Rama'. Fortunately, this spiritual be-in
was interrupted by a drug-addled love-in, before a
conga line took over the stage, and then the
curly-headed hero, Claude, entered and sang: 'Where do
I go, where do I go?'

Then Claude went around what was supposed to be Times
Square, and the cast put out the candles that they had
only just lit a minute before. Then it was the
interval. The cast asked questions about exactly where
they should be when a particular thing happened. They
were answered by Daniel Kramer, the director, whose
bright idea to bring Hair back to the stage this was.

Kramer, a 26-year-old American with a directing style
both camp and muscular, employed witty advice to help
his actors understand what he wanted. 'If you're
standing with your back to the audience, please make
it an interesting shape,' he said. 'Unless you're
Charlie Chaplin, the human back is really boring to
look at.' He knew the musical from every angle, even
though some lines had only been revised the night
before.

Part of his challenge was making the play work in such
a small space; including the band, there will be 20
people on stage, and only 65 in the audience. Another
problem was making sense of a show that contained
songs indelibly linked with the late Sixties -
'Aquarius', 'Good Morning Starshine', 'Let the
Sunshine in' - and a show that is best remembered for
glorious political naivety and the excessive use of
the loon pant. Kramer had slightly less of a dilemma
finding modern parallels for an unpopular war,
potential environmental disaster and young people
trying to find themselves in a troubled world.

These days, it all seems a little quaint. 'The
American tribal love-rock musical' rebelled against
everything that was bad in the West: the war in
Vietnam, the generational divide, organised religion,
the treatment of native Americans, racism, pollution.
It proposed an alternative society based, as far as
anyone could tell, on fellatio, sodomy, cunnilingus,
masturbation and LSD. In London, Paris and Chicago,
people were taking to the streets to protest, but in
Manhattan a group of hairies was asking theatregoers
to pay to hear them sing about how their leaders were
taking them to hell.

The songs were the plot and the script seemed like an
afterthought: young man in a big city feels alienated
in changing society, is torn this way and that by
conservative parents and beautiful but way-out new
friends, has girlfriend problems and is drafted for
Vietnam. Some of the script was great. Abraham Lincoln
was the 'emanci-muthafuckin-pator of the slaves'. The
draft was 'white people sending black people to fight
yellow people to protect the country they stole from
red people'. But some of the script was not great:
'Oh,' says Claude to his parents early on, 'I've got
to get me out of this flat and start Liverpoolin' it
up with me mates... out on to the Technicolor streets
with me daffodils. Me pretty little daffodils.'

But the big thing about Hair was that no one had
really seen a bunch of hippie types organise
themselves so well before. This was because the cast -
or tribe as they liked to call themselves - weren't
actually all dropouts from some odoriferous stone age
but a group of highly talented, energetic people right
there punctually in the name of entertainment.

Despite this, it still wasn't like My Fair Lady. When
Hair opened in London, those audience members who had
barely been able to prevent themselves from dancing in
the aisles during the show got up at the end to dance
on stage with the tribe. Princess Anne did it. 'The
18-year-old princess broke into a hip-swinging
routine, flinging her arms in abandon,' the New York
Times reported. She was wearing a navy-blue
trousersuit and white blouse, which remained tucked in
despite her abandon.

Seeing Hair was like seeing an early punk rock band:
if it hit you, it hit you and, to a certain extent, it
would define you; the next morning the world looked a
little different. Ruby Wax recently told Saga magazine
that she 'slept with everybody' in the cast: 'Well
actually, I got the gay guys and ended up with the
lead guitarist. I couldn't sing, so it was the only
way I could get in it.'

Hair was born four times in the late Sixties. It began
a short run as the first play at Joseph Papp's
Anspacher Public Theatre in October 1967 and soon
transferred to the Cheetah discotheque on Broadway.
Here it was not a hit, the audiences couldn't yet see
the point of dancing after a play and there were
conflicts between the writers, the producer, the cast
and the director about what they were supposed to be
doing. As the producer later explained: 'The director
wasn't a hippie; he was a beatnik.'

The creative team persevered. James Rado and Gerome
Ragni (book and lyrics) and Galt MacDermot (music)
wrote additional songs, and a new director, Tom
O'Horgan, introduced 'sensitivity exercises' to unite
his cast. Hair got a slot at the Biltmore on Broadway
in April 1968 when another show dropped out and, for a
while, it became a sensation, not least when people
complained about the swearing or nudity, or when an
astronaut walked out during the interval because he
felt insulted by what the tribe was doing to an
American flag.

It opened at the Shaftesbury Theatre in London six
months later, a day after the Lord Chamberlain's
powers to censor stage productions were abolished. The
show provided breaks for Paul Nicholas, Elaine Paige,
Marsha Hunt, Oliver Tobias and Sonja Kristina, and
they received a generally warm, if slightly perplexed,
critical welcome. The Financial Times described a
'vocal few in the gallery' who objected to the
nipples, and its drama critic looked in vain for a
traditional plot, but he did admire the exuberance and
'three smashing girls' in the cast.

The real hipsters and the underground press were less
keen, just as the original punks didn't like it when
ripped T-shirts appeared in Top Shop. As each month of
the four-year run passed, the freshness slowly gave
way to parody. Towards the end, coach parties would
arrive, and Hair became as much of an institution as
the institutions it was knocking.

Inevitably, Hair grew. It has been performed in
Sweden, Mexico, Turkey, Venezuela and Japan, and the
soundtrack is available in many languages. In 1979, it
was made into an ill-judged film by Milos Forman,
something Time Out reasoned was 'a smug, banal
fairytale with a message' that was neither old enough
to have acquired the dignity of a period piece, nor
young enough to have the slightest relevance.

In 1993, Hair was revived at the Old Vic, the last
time it was seen in London. This was not a radically
updated version and it bombed. Free love then meant
mostly one thing: Aids. One of the production staff
has said that the reason it flopped was that the cast
was made up of 'Thatcher's children who didn't really
get it'.

The producer of Hair on Broadway, and subsequently 30
other productions, was Michael Butler, who has been
utterly transformed by the experience 'from a
military-industrial hawk to mind-altered dove'. Butler
was running for the US Senate when he saw the first
production and taking it to a wider audience seemed to
him the most daring political statement he could make.

'Hair is about freedom, peace and love,' he tells me.
'Its lessons are permanent and universal.' I asked him
for his thoughts on the Old Vic show, but he hadn't
seen it. 'I was told by original tribe members that it
was terrible. Hair should not be done by strictly
commercial producers, nor dominated by number
crunchers. It is a work of affection and needs to be
produced with TLC.'

He says that of all his productions of Hair, the two
that were dominated by commercial considerations
didn't work. I also ask him about nudity. 'Nudity is
an important element in Hair. I refer to "the
Emperor's [New] Clothes". Certainly, in this era of
American imperial hubris, that tale bears
consideration. Frankly, the nudity at the end of Act 1
is what has brought a lot of people in to see Hair.
Then we have them for the messages in the second act
which mean so much.'

I ask whether he will be coming over for the new show,
but he says that unfortunately this Saturday he is due
to take part in a 'major Hair tribal reunion' and he
would be 'dealing with the aftermath'. Perhaps there
is another reason; he said that he didn't think a
radical update would work. 'Even small tinkering is in
error.'

Meanwhile, over at the home of big tinkering, the
nudity rehearsals are over. I meet Daniel Kramer at a
pub near his flat in Camden. He drinks neat whisky and
says he is nervous about interviews. He also says:
'I'm 26 and at 26 I can't afford to fail', which is
perhaps not something a tribe member would have said
in 1967.

Kramer is rightly regarded as a hotshot. He became
associate director at the Gate after his successful
production there of Woyzeck and his direction of Simon
Callow in Through the Leaves at the Southwark
Playhouse transferred to the West End. On Hair, he is
joined by lots of other hotshots, most in their
mid-twenties. There is ambitious producer Tali Pelman,
an Israeli who grew up in South Africa and New York
before being advised by actor Brian Cox to try her
hand at the Gate; there is artistic director Thea
Sharrock, she of the upsetting email, who will soon
direct Richard Griffiths, John Hurt and Ken Stott in
Tom Stoppard's translation of Gerald Sibleyras's
Heroes in the West End; there is the musical director
Stephen Brooker, who did the same job for The Woman in
White, My Fair Lady and South Pacific; there is sound
designer Mick Potter, who this year won an Olivier for
The Woman In White; there is hair by Vidal Sassoon;
and then there is the bright-voiced cast, some fresh
out of drama school, others from Miss Saigon and Les
Mis, all of them committed to succeeding where others
have failed.

Kramer has lived in England for five years. When he
was a young boy in America, he used to listen to the
songs of Hair a lot and for years he has nurtured
hopes of directing his interpretation. He was
convinced that most of the songs still held up, but
his attempt to convince others that he could be make
them resonate was a struggle.

'I'd taken it to a few producers who shall remain
nameless,' he says. The Iraq war strengthened his
resolve. 'I felt like it was my duty to do it; it was
my chance for me to speak up about America and the
war. It's more appropriate for an American to do that
than a Brit.' When another play that Kramer hoped to
direct at the Gate disappointed during workshops, Hair
took its place. Or, rather, the battle to obtain
permission to produce a new version of Hair took its
place.

'It was a little war in itself,' Kramer says of the
months that it took to convince the surviving original
writers - lyricist James Rado and composer Galt
MacDermot - that it wasn't going to be like some of
the other projects they had been involved with. 'There
was the Danish production in the late Nineties
directed by a protege of Ingmar Bergman,' James Rado
explains. 'I was impressed by the credit and the guy.
Worked with him and, with hopeful generosity, gave him
creative leeway. I was mightily shocked when I saw the
show in Copenhagen and to my chagrin found the
director had used the story of the Hair movie [which
is not one of my favourite things in life].'

More recently, there was the Viennese production.
'Instead of Claude being a hippie who has a lock of
his hair cut in the opening scene,' Rado remembers,
'he was now a guy who sat in a barber-like chair and
had a tattoo burned into his skin. The whole thing was
elaborately conceived and recorded, but to me was a
fiasco. I vowed: never again.'

Kramer sent him a draft of his updates, which included
references to 11 September, the war in Iraq and the
Kyoto Protocol, and bit-parts for Bush and Blair. The
writer liked enough of it to keep talking to him, and
Rado soon provided new suggestions. 'Jim said that he
really didn't want me to hold back on it,' Kramer
says. 'He thought that if we were going to do this at
all, we may as well be as radical as we could possibly
be.' Rehearsals began four days after the London
bombings, which were immediately incorporated into the
script.

Kramer is understandably reluctant to reveal too much
detail about the transformation. The text updates I
have seen are quite modest - the Hare Krishna be-in is
now specifically a vigil for peace in the Middle East,
while Claude's attack on his parents' interest in
collecting S&H Green Stamps and King Korn coupons has
been changed to Doritos stamps. But it is clear that
the whole mood of the musical has shifted and
darkened. The action takes place in today's New York,
although Kramer talks about creating a heightened
reality and a scene transformation that may remind the
audience of watching MTV (and perhaps also the
adverts, where 'Aquarius' now promotes the Ford Focus
Zetec).

At the Gate, 'Aquarius' leads to the tribe's hangout,
'a funky little loft space with some cool graffiti on
the wall, and this is where they come after classes at
NYU to hang out and smoke a joint and talk about
politics and relationships. Then we get to meet the
gay man, who, in 1968, was bisexual, but in 2005 is
full-on gay.

Then we meet the white boy who is lost and on Prozac,
searching for something that means something to him in
the world. Then it's his medication time and he takes
his Prozac and we go inside his mind. There's this
whole movement in which Bush and Rumsfeld and
Condoleezza Rice appear, and there's racism,
homophobia, protesting, fighting, crime, the
environment ...

Kramer says that the auditions took the form of a
lengthy political discussion. 'Most people did not
know what the Kyoto Protocol was. It's not a judgment,
but I tended to go with the people who did.' He also
discussed nudity. 'I said to everyone, "It's Hair,
it's famous for its nudity, it doesn't affect casting,
but tell me what your comfort level is." One person
said they might have a problem. So some of them are
taking it off and some of them aren't, but I said from
the start that I'm not letting nudity get in the way
of me not casting a brilliant performer.

'At the time I was casting, I had cut the nudity scene
out, because that's not what it's about for me. But
then I began to get interested in why nudity is still
taboo, especially in America. Britney Spears can
appear on Nickelodeon and grind in front of 10,000
children, but I'd rather have Garden of Eden nudity
than have a child watch her fuck a microphone.' Kramer
says there is also a second nude scene, 'which I won't
speak about, but if it doesn't make a point I will
give up and go back to America'.

There is no doubting the great risks Kramer and his
team are taking to get their message through. Not
since the days when Stephen Daldry was in charge has
the Gate laid such a huge, hopeful spread before an
audience, and with such a deep ambition, too. The
expression 'in your face' can seldom have suited a
production so well.

In one sense, they already have a hit on their hands.
The run is returns-only at the box office and an
extension is being planned; after that, the transfer
to a larger space seems probable. But in another
sense, it's all to play for. The fact that Hair has
never been successfully updated before suggests that
it is rather easier to claim relevance than conjure
it.

Some things don't change even in four decades. Each
night, a group of young people must walk on to a stage
to address one of the oldest and most complex
questions of all: can they make a difference?


	
		
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