A Frizzy, Fizzy Welcome to the Untamed ’60s

By BEN BRANTLEY

You'll be happy to hear that the kids are all right. Quite a bit more than all right. Having moved indoors to Broadway from the Delacorte Theater in Central Park — where last summer they lighted up the night skies, howled at the moon and had ticket seekers lining up at dawn — the young cast members of Diane Paulus's thrilling revival of "Hair" show no signs of becoming domesticated.

On the contrary, they're tearing down the house in the production that opened on Tuesday night at the Al Hirschfeld Theater. And any theatergoer with a pulse will find it hard to resist their invitation to join the demolition crew. This emotionally rich revival of "The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" from 1967 delivers what Broadway otherwise hasn't felt this season: the intense, unadulterated joy and anguish of that bi-polar state called youth.

Yes, I know there was a musical called "13," about being exactly that age, that opened last fall, and that a lyrical revival of "West Side Story" is now playing to packed houses only a few blocks away. But what distinguishes "Hair" from other recent shows about being young is the illusion it sustains of rawness and immediacy, an un-self-conscious sense of the most self-conscious chapter in a person's life.

Notice I did say "illusion." Ms. Paulus and her creative team have worked hard at their seamless spontaneity. Karole Armitage's happy hippie choreography, with its group gropes and mass writhing, looks as if it's being invented on the spot. But there's intelligent form within the seeming formlessness. And the whole production has been shaped in ways that find symmetry — and complexity — in a show that people tend to remember as a feel-good free-for-all.

"Hair" has a history of defying expectations. Gerome Ragni, James Rado and Galt MacDermot's portrait of living low and staying high in the East Village was, by all accounts, a mess up to the day it opened for previews at the Public Theater in 1967, with a last-minute switch of directors and several wholesale restagings. It was not an obvious candidate for the Broadway transfer it made the following year (with a new director, Tom O'Horgan, and a streamlined book). But of course it ran and ran, for 1,750 performances, and became the last original Broadway musical to introduce more than a couple of Top 40 hits.

Its latest resurrection, however, may be the most surprising of all. "The show is the first Broadway musical in some time to have the authentic voice of today rather than the day before yesterday," wrote Clive Barnes in The New York Times when "Hair" opened in 1968. "Authentic voices of today" tend to grow cracked and quaint with age. A 1977 revival, which ran for 43 performances, suggested that "Hair" was strictly a show for its time, not for the ages.

That there's nothing of the museum — or, worse, of the vintage jukebox — about Ms. Paulus's production isn't because she's reinterpreted or even reframed it. She does what Bartlett Sher did for "South Pacific" last year, finding depths of character and feeling in what most people dismissed as dried corn. It's not so much what Ms. Paulus brings to "Hair"; it's what she brings out of it, vital elements that were always waiting to be rediscovered.

Most important, she clearly knew early that "Hair" isn't just a celebration of the counterculture it depicts. The young folks here who sleep, trip and protest together may spout the philosophy of "peace, love, freedom, happiness." But, hey, they're all mostly in the waning days of their adolescence, a time when moods swing wide and adulthood looms as a suffocating shadow.

The kids of "Hair" are cuddly, sweet, madcap and ecstatic. They're also angry, hostile, confused and scared as hell — and not just of the Vietnam War, which threatens to devour the male members of their tribe. They're frightened of how the future is going to change them and of not knowing what comes next. Acting out the lives of the adults they disdain (a charade at which Andrew Kober, Theo Stockman and Megan Lawrence are particularly expert) becomes a cathartic ritual.

Ms. Paulus vividly establishes the show's essential dichotomy in the first number, when she brings two performers to center stage. On the one hand, there's Dionne (Sasha Allen), who leads the anthemic "Age of Aquarius" with soaring spirits and unimpeachable authority; on the other, standing to Dionne's right, there's Crissy (Allison Case), with a scrunched-up face and contorted posture that read like a plea for help, shelter and attention.

They all want attention, of course. Who doesn't at that age? At least except when you're longing to be invisible, like Claude (Gavin Creel), a young man who's about to be drafted, who leads the show's most stirring songs of affirmation ("I Got Life") and helplessness ("Where Do I Go").

Though a less flashy and show-offy presence than his best friend, Berger (Will Swenson), Claude is the divided soul of "Hair." At the Delacorte, Jonathan Groff, with his outsider's wistfulness, seemed such a natural in the part that I was sure that the Broadway "Hair" would suffer from his absence. But the pure-voiced Mr. Creel, late of "Mary Poppins," scruffs up real nice. That he seems more a part of the gang than Mr. Groff did somehow makes this Claude come across as more of a bellwether of the group, the one who's most in touch with the ambivalence they're all feeling.

Mr. Creel does not dominate the show; nor does the terrific Mr. Swenson, who finds an edge of cruelty and desperation in the grandstanding Berger; nor does Caissie Levy (an excellent new addition to the cast) as the earnest politico Sheila, the woman both men sort of love.

Every single ensemble member emerges as an individual, each with specific issues and knotty histories that no drug or slogan can resolve. (Even their nudity, and how they flaunt it, in the first-act finale, further defines them.)

After the show I couldn't stop thinking about what would happen to Bryce Ryness's sexually inchoate Woof; Ms. Case's hopeful, fretful Crissy; Darius Nichols's defiant, suspicious Hud; Kacie Sheik's pregnant, cheerily adrift Jeanie; or Ms. Allen's taunting, sensually assured Dionne. I could go on through the entire cast list.

Mr. MacDermot's music, which always had more pop than acid, holds up beautifully, given infectious life by the onstage band and the flavorfully blended voices of the cast. Scott Pask's exposed-wall set is the perfect playground for a world in which imagination (aided by chemical substances) provides the décor.

But of course no stage can contain the hormone-stoked exuberance of those who inhabit it, whether they're yipping, unzipping or tripping, both merrily and scarily. Know that you may find yourself in intimate contact with various dancing, cajoling tribe members. They may give you daisies or leaflets. They may even ask you to embrace them. Not that you haven't already.

HAIR

The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical

Book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado; music by Galt MacDermot; directed by Diane Paulus; choreography by Karole Armitage; sets by Scott Pask; costumes by Michael McDonald; lighting by Kevin Adams; sound by Acme Sound Partners; orchestrations by Mr. MacDermot; music director, Nadia DiGiallonardo; music coordinator, Seymour Red Press; wig design by Gerard Kelly; associate producers, Jenny Gersten, Arielle Tepper Madover, Rebecca Gold/Debbie Bisno, Christopher Hart, Apples and Oranges, Tony and Ruthe Ponturo and Joseph Traina. Presented by the Public Theater, Oskar Eustis, artistic director; and Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Gary Goddard Entertainment, Kathleen K. Johnson, Nederlander Productions, Fran Kirmser Productions/Jed Bernstein, Marc Frankel, Broadway Across America, Barbara Manocherian/Wencarlar Productions, J K Productions/Terry Schnuck, Andy Sandberg, Jam Theatricals, Weinstein Company/Norton Herrick, Jujamcyn Theaters; Joey Parnes, executive producer; by special arrangement with Elizabeth Ireland McCann. At the Al Hirschfeld Theater, 302 West 45th Street, Clinton; (212) 239-6200. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.

WITH: Sasha Allen (Dionne), Allison Case (Crissy), Gavin Creel (Claude), Andrew Kober (Dad/Margaret Mead), Megan Lawrence (Mother/Buddahdalirama), Caissie Levy (Sheila), Darius Nichols (Hud), Bryce Ryness (Woof), Saycon Sengbloh (Abraham Lincoln), Kacie Sheik (Jeanie), Theo Stockman (Hubert) and Will Swenson (Berger).

The Cover of the Premiere Issue of Andy Warhol's Magazine INTERVIEW - Rado, Viva, Ragni and Agnes Varda on camera.

The New York Times

Monday, September 22, 1969

 

FILM FETE:  VIVA, RAGNI AND RADO IN "LIONS LOVE"

 

Movie by Agnes Varda Is Set in Hollywood

 

The Cast:

LIONS LOVE, written, directed and produced by Agnes Varda.  At the New York Film Festival, Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center.  Running time: 115 minutes.

With:  Viva, Gerome Ragni, James Rado, Shirley Clarke, Carlos Clarens and Eddie Constantine.

 

By Vincent Canby

 

 

 

At its best, Agnes Varda's "Lions Love" is a beautiful, cockeyed movie about a menage a trois - Viva, Gerome Ragni and James Rqado - who live on a Hollywood hilltop in a rented house with a giant bed, a heated swimming pool and plastic plants, mixed with real ones, both indoors and out.

 

The three performers, who ostensibly play themselves as they wait for the big Hollywood break, couldn't care less about the new morality as defined in a sniggery movie like "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice."  Viva and Jerry and Jim have passed beyond that frontier into a new innocence.  Like three children on an extended sleep-out, they loll about in bed together in the morning, arguing cheerfully about who's going to get the coffee and making crank telephone calls ("Hello, Bank of America?  I'd like to order $200 to go").

 

Later Viva decides they should have children, but she regards the prospect of pregnancy without enthusiasm.  "Do you think I could go through nine months of it and only come out with one?"  Instead, they    borrow some children to see what the experience might be like - and it's disaster.  The kids refuse to take naps, urinate in the pool and eat nothing but french fries drenched in catchup.  "I think," says Viva, "we have to find another way to spiritual life."

 

In all of these random details, "Lions Love," which was shown at the New York Film Festival Saturday night and again yesterday afternoon, is very funny, not much different from a television situation comedy, but one that is cool and loose and honest, more adult than most.  It also possesses a sense of time and place.  It's ironic that Miss Varda, whose husband, Jacques Demy, the gifted French director, tried unsuccessfully to capture the banal beauty of Los Angeles in his "The Model Shop," does just that in "Lions Love" without seeming to try very hard.

 

For about half the time, "Lions Love" is a kind of meta-Warhol movie, which is charming.  Miss Varda has taken Viva, Warhol's most valuable found object, and lit and framed her in a way that brings out the gentle pre-Raphaelite beauty suggested but never realized in things like "Bike Boys," "Lonesome Cowboy" and "Blue Movie."  Miss Varda has also found two perfect foils for Viva in the two stars and authors of "Hair." Rado, blandly handsome and comparatively reserved, and Ragni, who looks and acts lilke a liberated member of the Three Stooges, share Viva's talent for the magnificently convoluted non sequitur.

 

Unfortunately, Miss Varda has not been content just to doll up a simple, native American genre.  The director, whose French films "Cleo from 5 to 7" and "Le Bonheur" aspired to a seriousness never successfully communicated, has sought to give both Pirandellian and social dimensions to her contemporary fairy tale. 

 

"Lions Love" tries to suggest multiple levels of reality by posing as a movie within a movie.  Shirley Clarke, the real-life director ("The Connection," "The Cool World"), plays herself, newly arrived in Hollywood to make a New York style underground film with Viva as star.  Throughout "Lions Love" the actors talk to Miss Varda behind the camera and at one point Miss Varda steps in to show Shirley how to play a scene, a suicide, which Shirley says "is not my style."

 

Earlier, Miss Clarke has observed: "I don't know whether I'm in a movie or directing one."  Since the audience is never in doubt, this sort of thing is simply precious.  Miss Varda goes further astray with an extended sequence devoted to the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, as reported and reduced to comprehensible terms on television.

 

At this point, you might as well turn away from the movie, which has gone glum and fake in all the wrong ways, and read an interview with Miss Varda, a five-page copy of which was given to the press by the producer. 

 

Among other things, she says, "Lions Love" is about stars, movies, rented houses, freedom in love, plastic flowers, freedom of final cut, trees, television and the shooting and death of Bobby Kennedy.  It is about stars and movies, all right, but it's no more about any of the other things than the telephone directory is about the names it lists.

 

In addition to the players already mentioned, "Lions Love" includes brief appearances by Eddie Constantine and Carlos Clarens, the film buff extraordinary (author of the excellent "An Illustrated History of the Horror Film"), who acts as Miss Clarke's walking Guide Michelin to Hollywood and narrates a delightful montage of views of Lotus Land as it is today.  There is so much that is so pleasant in "Lions Love" that I wish Miss Varda hadn't tried to give it a larger significance, which - I'd like to add at the risk of sounding chauvinistic - seems paradoxically very naive and very French intellectual.

New York World Telegram

The New York Times

The Washington Post

The Boston Herald

The New York Times

Munich Newspaper

CONTROVERSIAL MUSICAL

"HAIR" OPENS AT AQUARIUS

 

By Cecil Smith

Times Drama Critic

 

In the wake of the findings of the investigation into the happenings in Mayor Daley's Chicago last August, "Hair," I suppose, could be regarded as a kind of hippie victory dance.

 

And yet to think of it so would be a disservice to the highly (maybe overly) publicized "American tribal love-rock musical" that began what could be an endless Los Angeles stand Tuesday in the new Aquarius Theater created out of the bones of Earl Carroll's svelte old Hollywood glamor palace.

 

Because, though "Hair" is a celebration, it celebrates itself, neither with hostility nor challenge but out of its own exuberant, fresh, uninhibited sense of being.  What you really get out of this stomping, hairy, raggedy, bizarre crew is a sense of a youthful life-force that for all its pretentions and posturings is as innocent and open and unassuming as a flower.

 

Not Shocking

And what "Hair" is essentially is one whale of a show that explodes in a bursting panorama out of the very seams of the renovated theater to a surprisingly melodic pop-rock score by Galt MacDermot that is pure gold.

 

It was greeted by a star-studded, black-tie and hippie-costumed audience that tore the place apart, stopping the show repeatedly with applause and finally giving it a standing ovation.  It also created a massive traffic snarl on Sunset Blvd. which delayed the opening for an hour.

 

All right, there are four letter words popping like popcorn, some words that cannot be used here but mostly words like love and life.  All right, there are sexual simulations, some quite explicit, and a hymn to "Sodomy."  All right, at the end of the first act, to a haunting questioning ballad, "Where Do I Go?", a squadron of young men and women strip to the unmistakable buff in a dim half-light that hardly separates the girls from the boys while a red psychedelic beam sweeps over them, a tableau about as salacious as Renoir.  I say that with all of this, and more, those who go to be either shocked or titillated are in for disappointment; irreverent it is, and critical of things like Vietnam, and even a bit gamy at times - but shocking it is not.

 

Draft-Card Burning

For instance, there's a draft-card burning rite as solemn as a Shriners ceremony (and not unlike one) in which the kids dress up in gaudy flowing robes and a barefoot princess carries a brazier of fire and there are incantations and mystic chants until they discover the card  being burned is from the New York Public Library.

 

And in the elaborate "Walking in Space" examination of the dreams provided by mind-expanding drugs, the dream is a kind of cock-eyed, Civil War charade with a fat, bumbling Gen. Grant and a Negro female Abe Lincoln in a phony beard doing the Gettysburg Address as a slurring beat song.  It's a naive, childlike fantasy.

 

The most touching number in the play is a gentle unrhymed, Lennon-like song about a teenybopper in love called "Frank Mills" and sung with heartbreaking simplicity by Carol Miller.

 

What is "Hair" about?  There's no discernible plot save a kind of thing about two pals, Claude and Berger, who live with a chick named Sheila and whose friends include faggoty Woof, black militant Hud and pregnant, pot-smoking Jeanie.  Claude is about to get drafted and eventually does.  But that's all.

 

But it's about something like smog ("Welcome, sulphur dioxide!  Hello, carbon monoxide!")  It's about "white people sending black people to fight yellow people to defend the land they stole from red people."  It's Hud strutting the Negro image on a "Colored Spade."  It's about a restless, rootless generation, beaded and barefoot, rejecting current values to seek values of its own, and not here asking you to accept its values but simply saying this is how it is.

 

And it's about hair - "Long, beautiful, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy down-to-there hair, like Jesus wore it, hallelujah, I adore it, hair..."

 

Wildly inv entive director Tom O'Horgan looses his swarming melee of a cast on the girders and grids and scaffoldings of the big open-staged theater, sending performers scrambliing up iron ladders, swinging by ropes over the audience, dashing madly up the aisles, sometimes moving in the delicate precision orf ballet, again erupting in mad geysers of wriggling riot.

 

Coauthors James Rado and Gerome Ragni in the roles of Claude and Berger that they turned into theatrical history in O'Horgan's Broadway version of their show are superb - blond, svelte, hung-up Rado with the draft breathing on him and not about to burn his card, and wild-haired, fuzzy anthropoid Ragni hung up on nothing.  Jennifer Warren (later Jennifer Warnes) is splendid as their sweet-singing foil Sheila.  Ben Vereen's glowering Hud, Jobriath Salisbury's blooming Woof and Teda Bracci's freaked-out Jeanie are all the parts required, and I was impressed by the singing of Gloria Jones and the aforementioned Carol Miller.

 

In the theater that producers Michael Butler, Ken Kragen, Tom Smothers and Ken Fritz have formed from the famous old nightclub (to the tune of around $250,000), a proscenium is formed of light grids on which laundry hangs and Robin Wagner has contrived a brilliant setting out of hub caps, chrome bumpers, garbage cans and the like, and behind which the original American Flag with its circle of 13 stars makes silent comment.

 

While there is very little left of the Rado-Ragni plot from their original off-Broadway show, their lyrics are extraordinary.  But the most moving lyric in the show, and perhaps the most beautiful song, is "What a Piece of Work Is Man?" for a play called "Hamlet" by a man named Shakespeare.

The Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1968

 

STARS TURN OUT AT

OPENING OF "HAIR"      Photo of Richard Chamberlain

 

"Hair" should be called "Heat."  At least judging by opening night.  L.A.'s new Aquarius Theater, which houses the Butler-Kragen-Smothers-Fritz presentation of the Broadway love-rock musical was steaming hot - so hot that many in the audience found it uncomfortable to applaud.  I was among them.

 

We applauded anyway, but somebody had better tell Tommy Smothers to turn on the air conditioning.  And to start on time.  The audience, arriving for a 7:30 curtain, had to wait over an hour for the first marvelous, hip-squalid signs of life.

 

Apart from the heat and the halt, "Hair" proved as delightful as a draught of Mouton Rothschild on a very cold night.  It travels better, in fact, and ages as well.  It has been slightly updated.  One of the posters in the energetic musical protest march, newly lettered, reads, "Nixon is Rosemary's Baby."

 

The cast, happily, hippily headed by writers Gerome Ragni and James Rado, makes this still the best of the rock musicals by far so far.  The score, by Galt Mac Dermot, doesn't detract one whit from the controversial dialog and doings.  (I suppose Tommy Smothers may have left off the air conditioning in order to keep those naked men and women - there were a dozen of them - warm.)

 

As for the audience, it was hard to decide which was the most interesting couple.  Richard Chamberlain came with George Le Maire, and Irwin Allen trailed down the aisle just a giant step behind Groucho Marx.  It was that kind of night.  George Furth was with Bobo Lewis, Barbara Parkins with John Phillip Law, Robert Vaughn and Lee Marvin were by themselves, as was Hugh O'Brian, all wrapped up in a blue velvet high-collared quasi-Edwardian jacket - even though Hugh came with a date.

 

Half of Laugh-In was there - Jude Carne, Jo Ann Worley, Dick Martin, the George Schlatters, Ed Friendlys - and both of the Smothers, Tom and Dick.  CBS was there: it probably had to be, or the Smothers wouldn't go on on Sunday night.  Handsome group president John (oh-is-he-handsome) Schneider came with West Coast chief Perry Lafferty and his wife Fran.  Sonja Henie came late, attracting attention, as always, this time with a powder blue mink jacket dyed to match her blue beaded dress.

 

It was wild, with a party afterwards in a tent on Sunset Blvd.  Everyone was there, even Liberace.  I kept wondering how Liberace liked the show.

1970 article about "Hair" in the Toronto Telegram.

The Telegram

Toronto, Monday, January 12, 1970

 

OUR HAIR'S THE HAIRIEST HAIR YET

 

By Pat Annesley

Telegram Staff Reporter

 

It was one of those nights that wasn't supposed to happen, but it did.

 

Whoever heard of a theatrical opening on a Sunday night?  In Toronto.  In January.  When it's 20 degrees and snowing, and not a bar open in town.

 

Hair opened last night anyway.  This is the American tribal love rock musical that schedules its openings - 18 cities to date - according to the stars, and the stars said Jan. 11 in Toronto.  (The international Hair organization has its own astrologer.)

 

Hair opened.  And 1,496 people filled the Royal Alex to see it.  Nine hundred of them went to the big party afterwards thrown by the producers at the Royal York.  And the whole evening was an eye-popping, ear-popping, floor-thumping smash.

 

Hair opened.  And Clive Barnes, the theatre critic in North America, flew in from New York and said:  "I love it.  This is the best Hair I've seen, and I've seen it in London and Paris and New York.  This is the hairiest Hair Yet."

 

They flew in from Los Angeles, too.  And Las Vegas and Chicago and San Francisco.  And they said:  "Hey man, Toronto is great.  This is a swinging place you've got here."

 

Hair, as almost everyone in the hip opening-night crowd was aware, is a show that adapts itself to whatever city it's playing.  All the cast is always local, the 3 extra numbers and lines that are thrown in a production tend to have a local flavor, and the script and staging are so loose that it tends to come out a whole new Hair in every town.  That's the whole idea - a reflection of the way it is, with youth and the Establishment, music and love, and war and peace.  Here.

 

So the out-of-towners came and said:  "Wow."  And the Torontonians looked at one another and they said:  "Well, yes.  Come to think of it, Wow."

 

And Toronto's new image, the thing they're always writing about in the newspapers but nobody really believes, got a sudden, galvanized shot in the arm.  On a Sunday night, too.

 

Sure there were the ones at the party who said  "Great show yeah. But I gotta get out of here.  God, I need a drink."

 

But most of them stayed and stayed.  The producers had laid on a lavish buffet, an excellent rock band and soft drinks for all.  Coca-Cola everywhere and not a drop to drink.  And it mattered less and less as the night wore on: The crowd was high on Hair.

 

After that wild, pulsating show, it had to be a party where even the beautiful people forgot about their baubles and beads and lost themselves on the dance floor.  Silver heels fell off $40 shoes, and they laughed and danced in stocking feet.

 

Stars from the show joined in jamming with the band.  You couldn't find anybody you were looking for in the mob, and you didn't much care.  
And strangers hugged one another.

 

It was a night to remember, but nobody will remember much beyond the usual wing-ding kaleidoscope, little spots of color here and there.

 

Like the yellow Rolls-Royce parked in front of the theatre.  It was an old one, a dazzling museum piece.  Whose was it?  Would he get a ticket?  It was Gaston's, the guy who runs the restaurant on Markham St. with the great onion soup.  And he did.

 

So did the other Rolls a few yards up the street, a new white one.  So did the Jaguar sandwiched between them.  It seems the policeman was under pressure from a group of hapless diners at Ed's Warehouse, who chose last night for a quiet dinner out then couldn't get their cars out of the parking lot because the show had started and the crush was on.

 

(part missing)

 

The theatre itself was one of the stars of the night.  From the beginning the Hair people had said "this is our theatre," and if they could they'd move it brick by brick to Boston and all the other places where Hair is yet to come.

 

And what they did with that monument to Victorian opulence may have come as a shock to some of the Alex regulars, but it worked.  As they say in show business.

 

SEEN THROUGH

Then at the party, there was Gale Garnett, the female lead, in a flowing white see-through caftan that had every flashbulb in the place popping.

She was dancing with a little boy on her shoulders.

 

There was Tobi Lark, the sensational singer who was hurt onstage a couple of weeks ago, covering her tightly-bandaged leg with a shimmering Afro-robe and high-rising turban to match that she made herself.  Bandages or not, she was one of the first to leap up on the bandstand and get into the impromptu session.

 

There was the irrepressible Rudy Brown whose line "I feel good" never fails to break them up, gyrating across the room in a shiny Nehru suit.  And the tall African-looking dancer with his flowing headband, doing a real Watusi, looking as though his head was attached by a rubber band.  And all the beautiful young Hair girls in simple, bra-less splendor.

 

The beautiful people were outclassed but they didn't seem to mind.  It was the cast's night, and everybody gave it to them.  They won it.

 

A well-known promoter about town was heard to say:  "If Glen Warren (Glen Warren Productions of Toronto is co-producing the show with Michael Butler, head of the international Hair organization) wants to sell out half their action, I'll take it."

 

His companion's comment:  "Are you kidding?"

 

$7,000 PARTY

This is the most expensive Hair ever staged.  Up to last night it cost $260,000, including $7,000 for the party.  The costumes, props and lighting are far more elaborate than in other cities, and cost about double the tab for the New York production.

 

It is also the first theatrical production in Canada ever to get past $200,000 in advance bookings.  It passed that milestone while the show was still casting last fall, and the figure is now up around $500,000 and still climbing.

 

Businessmen kept talking about how "they're going to make a pile on this."

 

People in show business kept going back to the sets and the costumes, and how "they spent a pile on this."

 

And a man named Richard Osorio, who holds the title of El Cid in the peculiar nomenclature of the international Hair group, which means he's next down the line from number one Silver Indian Michael Butler, kept trying to figure out what was really special about this Toronto production.

 

Osorio travels the world seeing Hair productions, and the three best he's seen, he said are San Francisco, Chicago and Toronto.

 

San Francisco has this special "ensemble" character, where nobody's a star and the whole company "moves as one."  That's their thing.

 

Chicago is the gutsiest show going, where the cast has actually attacked the audience in its challenge to them to participate in the happening, to get with this coming age of Aquarius they're singing about.

 

"And Toronto...Toronto is somewhere in between.  When I first came here I thought this was the San Francisco of the north.  But really you're very conservative, like Chicago.  Yes the show says it for you: Toronto is a place where both kinds of people can live.  It's a groovy thing all its own.

Washington, D.C. review of  HAIR, 1995 National Tour, directed by James Rado

CITY LIGHTS THEATRE OF SAN JOSE, CA. 2008 review

This was a well reviewed show that sold out 98% of it's performances from July 16 thur August 31, 2008. I played "Ronnie"  -In the Center of the pic and on the Poster/Flyers below.  I had the privilege of singing Aquarius; What A Piece of Work Is Man, White Boys and Abie Baby and as seen below I Started Let The Sun Shine In.  HAIR was a life-changing show for me and our tribe THE WAPPINGER FEDERATION TRIBE is looking forward to our upcoming Winter Be-In later this month!

Thank you for the music!

Make love, not war

Theater Zone 2008 Florida

TheatreZone

"HAIR," June 12-22, TheatreZone, 13275 Livingston Road, Naples, (239) 451-0215, theatrezone.net

Easily the most under-appreciated show anywhere in Southwest Florida last season, the shambolic, shaggy and thoroughly enjoyable "Hair" hit the stage in early summer when there was virtually no audience to enjoy it. Ryan James and Shane Daniel Lord were the yin and yang of this merry band of free love children who sang their way through the summer in some of the most free-spirited, giddy and effervescent performances of the year.

New Line Theatre, St-Louis 2008