[Mb-hair] Gate HAIR-London Evening Standard

[Michael Butler]

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This is
LONDON
26/09/05 - Theatre & comedy section

Thin, even with highlights
By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard

I have nothing against orgies. In youth I even happily took part in the odd
one. So during this famous 1960s love-rock, peacenik musical, seated so
close to naked actors I could have stuck out a tongue or helpful hand to
participate in an orgy scene, I hopefully expected performances of fresh,
full-on conviction.

Some hope! Daniel Kramer's coarse-grained revival of Hair misses the
opportunity for intimate focus in a minute auditorium. It is projected as if
for a West End stage and audience, thanks to a vigorous, four-strong band
and frantic choreography.

The production's style, broad, loud and unsubtle, at odds with the
beautiful, soft-rock melancholia of much of Galt MacDermot's music, ensures
the orgiastic love-in looks grossly simulated. The scene proves typical.

Now history is written off as dead and youth only remembers last year's
mobile, Kramer has tried to doll-up Hair with a modish snazzy perm and new
highlights. Yet for those who remember the longtressed, rebellious original
musical, with book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, Kramer's
touched-up version will seem a case of alopecia, all new-wave opportunities
lost, too much predictable, old-fashioned dandruff visible.

Rado/Ragni mounted a fierce critique of America's Vietnam war, through the
prism of 1960s flower-power kids and hippy peaceniks.Those gorgeous songs
captured that exhilirating Sixties atmosphere of cultural and political
rebellion.

No wonder Britain's theatre censors, in their last gasp of power in 1968,
banned Hair, condemning it for wielding the cultural terrorist weapon of
antipatriotism with "dirty language, free-love, homosexuality, drug-taking
and anti-Establishment views" in full flow. Mr Blair would have sympathised.

Kramer's tame updating lacks subversive political vigour. The Vietnam war
becomes Bush's Iraq disaster. The President and Condoleeza Rice, not to
mention Oprah Winfrey, are sent up as silly caricatures in stylised
hair-pieces.

References to Prozac and a character tastessly tatooed with the initials H
IV VIP contribute to the non-specific mood. The flower-power is all faded.
Gayness, of which there was just a discreet dash in the original, is given
its head in mechanical fashion.

Charles Aitken's ash-blonde Claude, who soldiers in Iraq and ends up in a
coffin, wears a look and a voice of dopey bemusement. He commutes between
heterosexuality and gay propositions in the shape of Kevin Wathen's
swaggering, well-sung Berger.

The cast, as if over-powered on speed, willy dance and sing around a stage
decorated by a meaningless curtain. Yet the overwhelming pathos and appeal
of those songs, right down to the ironically hopeful Let the Sunshine in,
left me emotional and moist-eyed once again. How even this thin Hair gets to
me!

€ Until 8 October. Information: 020 7229 0706.


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http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/theatre/articles/20461503?version=1
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