It’s one thing to see Hair on Broadway, where it won this year’s Tony Award for best revival of a musical. The first rock opera, Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt MacDermot’s snapshot of a fleeting social movement in the East Village showed up at New York Shakespeare Festival in the autumn of the 1967 and transferred to Broadway the following year. It’s quite another thing to see it at the Chance Theatre, a small venue in Anaheim Hills, where the production’s extended run is bringing the best box-office returns in the theater’s 11-year history.
Photo by Doug Catiller
Taking a Chance on Hair
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It makes sense on Broadway, even 41 years later, as an homage to a wondrously, impossibly idealistic affront to the prevailing family values of chastity until marriage, and unquestioning trust in the military and the ways it was being deployed in Vietnam. New York and San Francisco were always hubs of the antiwar movement, and here is a musical about a tribe of naturalist-pacifists barely out of their teens, the children of presumably affluent or at least financially comfortable parents, who, in a time of rare economic bounty for the United States, chose to live in the streets of the East Village and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury; who believed that personal hygiene and shaving legs and arms were the overrated and pointless habits of their clueless parents. Of course this would play well on the coasts.
But everything this tribe mocks — professional dress codes, traditional morality, patriotism, and the treadmill of labor, consumption and raising a traditional family — were and remain cultural bedrocks in Orange County. One might imagine that the show is drawing the rowdies from nearby conservative Chapman College, but that wasn’t in evidence the performance I attended. Though the actors appeared barely beyond childhood, the audience was very much a graying-haired, ponytailed crowd.
Among the reasons for the sellout crowds is the sheer, sassy exuberance of the 15-member ensemble. Audience participation was always part of this show’s rite, particularly at the end, when patrons are invited to dance with the ensemble to the strains of “Let the Sunshine In.” But as part of his sleek staging, with KC Wilkerson’s lighting design of automated, roving beams, and with Kelly Todd’s taut choreography, director Oanh Nguyen pulls out all the stops of actor-audience interaction, with performers dancing in the aisles and cavorting into the crowd throughout.
Another reason for the show’s draw is the clarity and quality of the voices. When Amber J. Snead belts “when the moon is in the seventh house,” from the opening number, “Aquarius,” it’s a clarion call, one that sets the tone for this production. As the stoic Crissy, Raleigh R. Bisbee conjures Joan Baez in “Frank Mills,” Crissy’s only song — and it leaves you aching for a reprise, or at least another Bisbee solo.
Finally, there are the larger reasons that this revival would speak to the O.C.: its depiction of unrequited love’s pangs amidst a sexual revolution (“Easy to be Hard,” beautifully rendered by Michaelia Leigh); and the drumbeat of the War in Vietnam, which here snags a bewildered soul named Claude (James May, looking very Aryan), who, after receiving his draft card, can’t or won’t flee to Canada.
Truisms aboutthe War in Iraq are revealed by this Hair’s reflections on the War in Vietnam: that the lack of an antiwar movement in the 21st century was directly related to the lack of a military draft (the pressures of which are depicted here), and a press wearing blindfolds (images of U.S. casualties and coffins in Iraq were banned). Compare also the expressed torment of LBJ and even Nixon over the quagmire of Vietnam with the deafness and hostility of the Bush-Cheney team to all criticism, even to the early rallying cry of hundreds of thousands of protesters in Washington at the outset of the War in Iraq.
But neither the complicity of the press nor the paternalistic despotism of the Bush administration could quell the slowly growing perception that the underlying, official reasons for the War in Iraq were as much a sham as the strategy for winning there. The underlying purpose for that war, and our previous wars in Nicaragua, Vietnam — and the reasons in the 19th century that we annexed huge chunks of Mexican territory, including California, with our troops armed and ready in Mexico City in case there was a problem — was to establish bases of commerce. This was no different from what the British, French and Dutch had done previously all over the world. We won the land-grab tug of war with Mexico unfair and square. No qualms of national conscience about that.
The only reason Vietnam has been so ridiculously characterized as the place we “lost our innocence” was, as in Iraq, we lost confidence that we could win there. That’s the main reason both wars turned so unpopular. Nothing stifles reflection or qualms of conscience faster than a military victory.
