Sunday 18th August 2013 by Will Langdale
This week we’re taking a quick peek at a huge musical that’s not been seen in the West End for three years, yet remains an enduring phenomenon, with barely a day passing without it appearing on stage somewhere in the world. Hair (sometimes Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical) is an incredibly arresting piece of theatre that taps into a couple of the formulas of success in musical theatre, and plays up some artistic aspects unique to the genre. The ripples from Hair’s original splash back in 1968 can still be seen today.
Very much a product of its time, Hair is the story of Claude, a child of the post-war generation whose parents want him to join them in American society with a job, a wife, and a commitment to the capitalist machinery of the state. Yet Claude’s politics are very much against this. An American musical written during and set in the late 1960s, this is the age of far-left situationists, anti-war activists, psychedelics, sit-ins, Kent State, hippies, the French uprisings in 1968, Hunter Thompson, the CND, second-wave feminism and the Civil Rights Movement. These are the discourses that feed Claude, leader of the Tribe who share his beliefs, and the things that propel them to reject mainstream America, particularly the compulsory drafting of young men to the Vietnam War. Hair is this rebellion, and Claude is the conflict at the heart of America, part peaceful individual idealist, part complicit military-industrial pawn.
Hair is a musical that defines some of the best things about the genre. Its use of a very specific social and political milieu has informed stagings of Les Miserables, Jersey Boys and The Lion King, for example. All three of these shows come from a perspective of a marginalised figure who is at odds with the society they are in – The Lion King’s deposed heir, the convict seeking redemption in Les Miserables, and the wrong-side-of-the-tracks-made-good Frankie Valli in Jersey Boys. It’s no coincidence that all three are also very much concerned with co-opting, to a degree, the subcultures they depict, although the original Hair was to a degree very resistant to this. Hair was one of the only shows giving work to large amounts of black actors, and for many it was an introduction to a bloc of political thinking that included the newly-founded Birmingham School, one of the first places that popular culture had been examined in a serious political and theoretical light.
Hair’s alternative soundtrack has inspired hundreds of musicals since, including some of the most popular. Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease and We Will Rock You are three excellent examples of musicals that have been enabled by the legacy of Hair. As the examination of an alternative lifestyle, articulating a very particular community’s pain, Hair precedes musicals such as Rent or Billy Elliot. Despite this alternative streak, Hair was one of the last Broadway musicals to truly soak American culture since the era of shows like the original Top Hat, with several songs making it to the charts, samples of it cropping up all over the place, and runs numbering in the thousands both sides of the Atlantic with a film made in 1979 (though writers James Rado and Gerome Ragni were apparently displeased with it).
Though it may seem a little kitsch to a modern audience, Hair, just like Grease, was originally a violent evocation of pain and anger, a window into very raw struggles that young people must contend with in the face of dominant and repressive constructions of identity. It’s easy to forget that those competing to be Sandy and Danny on a Saturday night ITV talent show are vying to be in a show that depicts the stifling attitudes to abortion that America holds to this day, and the colourful close to The 40 Year Old Virgin, which is an homage to Hair, alludes to a generation that was gunned down by its own military at Kent State. Keep this in mind when you watch the film version of opening song Aquarius, and closing number The Flesh Failures (Let The Sunshine In). Here are two songs that have the brightness and optimism of youth contrasted with a solemn note of regret. As Aquarius crescendos, the mildly discordant minor timbre is at odds with a call for “harmony and understanding” that is myopic, rather than true, and this is the sadness at the heart of Hair. As Claude is drafted into the war, the call for the sun to shine in is plaintive rather than exuberant, with a nod to the communal hymns of black slaves, brilliantly evoked in the score by Galt MacDermot. Most importantly, both songs illustrate the vitality of community in Hair, which is a critical element of musical theatre. In the original show the cast infiltrated the audience, with Aquarius the soundtrack to their trip to the stage, while Let The Sunshine In backed an incitement for the audience to invade the stage. Musical theatre is about an involvement between the audience and the cast that’s closer to a church service than a play, and Hair is very aware of this.
We hope we’ve managed to pay apt tribute to a show that forms a very special part of the history of musical theatre, and whose influence can still be seen in shows currently running in our very own West End. If you think it sounds like a blast, there’s bound to be a revival in the next few years, but getting hold of the film and the original cast recording will be fantastic ways to see this historic piece of art. Hair might be of its time, but what a time it was.