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Diane Paulus directs Central Park's 'Hair' revival

Linda Winer | Critical Mass

July 27, 2008

Tommar Wilson, Will Swenson and Bryce Ryness in The Public Theater's presentation of "Hair", the musical which brought rock 'n' roll to the theatrical stage and defined the '60's generation. Delacorte Theater, Central Park. (Ari Mintz, Newsday / July 20, 2008)

A TV jingle caught my ear the other day. What was that melody? Why did it sound so deeply familiar? And what was it selling?

I did name that tune. But, really, I wish I did not.

You see, it was "Let the Sun Shine In," the anthem from the end of "Hair" - the 1967 anti-establishment rock musical now in previews for an Aug. 7 opening in Central Park.

(If the production is as wonderful as the one the Public Theater presented - with this same director and cast - last September for three raucous and heartbreaking 40th anniversary performances in the park, the show will prove to be surprisingly resilient, tragically timely and more than a little thrilling.)

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But back to that jingle. "Let the Sun Shine In" is meant to be wailed around the motionless body of Claude, back from Vietnam, curls shorn and still in his Army uniform. The tribe - that ragtag gang of furious young innocents - has just indicted "a dying nation" for "listening for the new-told lies/with supreme visions of lonely tunes."

Instead of ending their historic (if oddly hyphenated) "tribal love-rock musical" in impotent rage, the creators chose to embrace the sunlight. You can buy the refrain's optimism or you can scoff at its quaint naivete.

What the song should not make you want to do, however, is shave your armpits.

For reasons I cannot guess, the tune to "Let the Sun Shine In" is now being used to sell a brand of razor to women. Think about it. This show resisted war and celebrated freedom through the symbol of wild hair ("down to here, down to there, down to where it stops by itself").

Clearly, much has changed since Joseph Papp inaugurated his new theater downtown with a musical by unknowns about such unmentionables as gleeful drugs, polymorphous sexuality, racial defiance and the effect of dropping out on the postwar American dream. It would have been unthinkable to have corporate sponsorship of a rock concert or street-culture fashion without the content that molded it.

But that was then, a time before the counterculture wasn't yet an entirely ridiculous concept and before the word "co-opt" - remember that one? - had been co-opted by the media and the marketplace.

So here comes "Hair," which itself seemed pretty ridiculous in decades of revivals that treated the late-'60s like designer bell-bottoms on manicured flower children.

Last fall, the Public Theater did not want reviews for what turned out to be one of the memorable experiences of the year. Once again, Diane Paulus will direct a young cast that includes Jonathan Groff ("Spring Awakening") as Claude.

As I understand it, the revival - assumed to have its eye on a Broadway transfer - will have different costumes and more scenic design. I hope the simple power is not lost in more elaborate production values or an impulse to modernize the honesty with irony or show-biz overstatement.

Certainly, the original went through lots of changes before it brought exuberant pop-rock music, tough social protest and a glimpse of dimly lit nudity to Broadway's Biltmore Theatre in 1968. Papp, planning his first contemporary play for an institution built on classics, had no interest in starting with a musical.

But actors named Gerome Ragni and James Rado pestered him with a script.

"Some of the lyrics sounded smart and some absolutely silly. But there was also a sad little scene about a guy talking about going off to war. The thing that struck me was that it had to do with the loneliness of youth.... I thought 'I want to do something that comes out of the times we are living in.'"

In May 1968 - after a new staging by off Off-Broadway's Tom O'Horgan, a whole new score by Galt MacDermot, at least one new producer and a quick flop at a discotheque called the Cheetah - "Hair" was a Broadway hit. The cast included Ragni and Rado, plus a couple of young nobodies named Melba Moore and Diane Keaton.

Commercial-theater history was made with the four-letter words and the religious and patriotic irreverence. But most of the reviews responded at least as much to the show's sweetness - what Richard Watts of the Post called "Its wistful attempt to outrage the peasantry." Walter Kerr, writing in the Sunday New York Times, admired the boundary-breaking resistance to narrative form - what he called the "shapely shapelessness" and "the hidden discipline in the spontaneity."

By spring 1970, four national "Hair" companies were grossing more in a week than Papp's entire theater complex made in a season. Broadway audiences were never again surprised to have actors dashing through the aisles, ripping off their clothes, endorsing civil disobedience and trying, with variable success, to make Broadway songs into popular music again.

In 1979, Milos Forman and Twyla Tharp distorted the show's open '60s spirit into an entertaining but uncomfortably '70s movie. Ragni died of cancer in 1991. Rado has mostly traveled around the world overseeing productions of their one hit. MacDermot, who played keyboards last fall for "Hair," wrote the successful musical version of "Two Gentlemen of Verona," then flopped with "Dude" and "Via Galactica."

With new wars and environmental anxiety, "Hair" may well have grown back into its time. Oh, and one of the sponsors of the revival is a Manhattan hair salon. No jingles, please.

WHEN&WHERE

"Hair" presented by the Public Theater at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, mid-park at 80th Street, on the southwest corner of the Great Lawn; Tuesdays-Sundays 8 p.m.; admission is free; publictheater.org.