A new crop of 'Hair' and more pop musicals

Word-association quiz: If I say "Hair," "Jesus Christ Superstar," "Godspell" and "Rent," your answers are likely to bubble up from a niche of particularly vivid memories. I'm guessing the images will be about politics and fashion, at least as often as they are about music.

And it's all true, but not this time. The answer that best describes this grouping is, oddly enough, theater today.

For reasons the social scientists should love, three -- and probably all four -- of these iconic pop musicals are rearing their heads and hearts in the season that officially began in May and ends next April.

Right now, the 2009 Tony-winning revival of "Hair" has come in from a (heavy-handed) road tour to spend the summer reminding tourists about the pertinence of peace and love, circa 1967.

On Thursday, "Rent" opens at Off-Broadway's New World Stages in a new production directed by Michael Greif, who first staged Jonathan Larson's 1996 Pulitzer Prize winner that closed on Broadway in 2008.

In November comes the first Broadway revival of "Godspell," Stephen Schwartz's up-with-people, high-concept retelling of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, which opened Off-Broadway in 1971, moved to Broadway in 1976 for another 527 performances and has lived forever in schools and community centers.

Still a question mark (but one quickly followed by an exclamation point) is the arrival of a revival of "Jesus Christ Superstar." Des McAnuff ("Jersey Boys," "The Who's Tommy") has had a huge success with the production he staged this summer at his Stratford Shakespeare Festival outside Toronto. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice reportedly approve of this version of their breakthrough collaboration, which began as a rock-opera album in 1970. Broadway producers are sniffing around. At this writing, nobody's confirming beyond a Los Angeles engagement.

Why are we suddenly having this brief history of pop musicals? Should we explain the coincidence as proof, finally, of rock's inarguable significance in the evolution of the musical? Or are we just getting the golden oldies because kids who did "Godspell" in school are now parents who want their kids to see it, too?

Producer Jeffrey Seller, who has supported "Rent" since its first reading in 1993, has a more provocative theory. "Culturally," he told me in a phone interview from his Sagaponack home, "there is no more generation gap. I'm now 46. When I was growing up, our parents and grandparents had completely different cultures. Their music was different. Everything in their lives was different.

"But our kids grow up with the same music. Lady Gaga isn't that much different from Madonna. And that's the very reason people are still interested in 'Hair,' in 'Jesus Christ Superstar.' "

Then there is what he sees as the universality of the "Rent" story. Larson, who died at 35 of an aortic aneurysm after the last dress rehearsal, loosely based his first and last big show on "Scènes de la Vie de Bohème," the same Henri Murger novel that Puccini turned into the beloved opera "La Bohème." "It's a classic bohemian story," says Seller. "Middle-class kids move to the city to pursue artistic dreams, fall in love and have their hearts broken. They worry about not selling out. This doesn't age."

"Rent," set on Christmas Eve in the early '90s, is also about AIDS, the perils of careerism and gentrification in the East Village -- the same neighborhood where the show opened at the New York Theatre Workshop.

"Hair" and "Godspell" also began life in the East Village -- "Hair" at the Public Theater, "Godspell" at La MaMa -- a neighborhood still struggling between artists and big real estate. Like "Rent," both get heft for their modern concerns from classics. "Hair," with its "Hamlet" references to youthful indecision and idealism, takes on the conformity of post-World War II prosperity, as well as Vietnam, specifically, and war, in general. (I wish the current road cast seemed to understand that this is more than just a happy hippie show.)

Although "Godspell" is best known as a show by the composer of "Pippin" and "Wicked," the musical was based on the master's thesis by John-Michael Tebelak, who directed the hit original and died, also at 35, of a heart attack in 1985. Edgar Lansbury, the original producer, hired Schwartz to write a new score that kept many of the lyrics from Episcopal hymns.

Lansbury (Angela's brother) recently joined the revival. But the central force behind this production is Ken Davenport, main producer and a kind of Broadway activist with his own blog. "So many people say that this was the first show they ever saw. Forty years from now, a whole new generation will say this 'Godspell' was a great introduction to Broadway, too."

Again, but why now? "I've been waiting for a reason to do the revival," he said. "What could be more relevant now?" He mentions the debt crisis, health care, the fact that "no one in this country can get on the same page."

He insists that the show, in which people learn to understand one another by following Jesus, isn't religious. "It's really about getting people to remember we are part of a group, part of the same world." He won't say where this "Godspell" is set or whether the followers are played, as they have been, as clowns or flower people. He will say that the revival "honors the original but is definitely contemporary."

Generation gap or not, it is safe to assume this Bible-inspired musical won't be competing with "The Book of Mormon" for demographics.