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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.