Hair Pacific Musical Theatre at the Athenaeum Theatre
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Directed by Dan Kern and punchily accompanied by an onstage band under Bobby Naffarette’s musical direction, this Hair is free of the flashy slickness that bloated the 20th-anniversary revival in 1988 at the Vic Theatre. Though Michael Butler, the Chicagoan who produced Hair on Broadway in 1968, produced both the Vic revival and the current one, this time around there are no lasers, video monitors, Vegas choreography, or Peter Pan flying effects. Good riddance. In their place is a welcome sense of gravity. The youngsters Butler has imported may be short on charisma, but they have plenty of heart and conviction to bolster their sometimes rough but always ready voices. While they lack the rage that the Vietnam war brought out in Hair’s original casts, they convey compassion for their characters’ fumbling search for love, approval, and self-understanding as they try to build a utopian alternative to a repressive, hypocritical system.
The attempt is doomed to fail, of course. Hair depicts that fact, and the reason for it: human beings’ dishonesty. The characters in Hair are liars; they lie to one another and to themselves. In their interaction is mirrored the lies of a society that promises peace, freedom, and equality while it destroys lives in war, repression, and racism.
Is Hair “relevant” today? Butler’s decision to mount the show here this month, as an unofficial adjunct to the Democratic National Convention, raises the question. His purposes are largely commercial (astutely so, judging from the long line I saw at the box office) and largely egotistical (the hallway into the auditorium is festooned with photos of himself, suggesting a self-image that’s half Timothy Leary, half David Merrick). But I think he also genuinely believes in Hair as a tool for teaching modern audiences, including the Dem delegates, about issues that have helped shape America in the past 30 years. The Vietnam controversy launched a political-cultural war that’s still being fought; when “1948” sneers at “1968” for acting “so damn superior” in Hair, it might as well be Bob Dole sniping at Bill Clinton’s character.
