Peace, love, and good vibes — with bells on. Add to that a festive atmosphere, a social conscience, and a psychedelic rock score, and you have a fair summary of the epochal musical Hair, which Brown University Theater is staging through March 19. Subtitled “The American Tribal Love/Rock Musical,” the play was history-making in several ways. It celebrated the hippie movement, then at its height, before the general public and was the first rock musical, for a start. Some of its songs, such as “Let the Sun Shine” and “The Age of Aquarius,” are still sung in showers today, and others, such as “Sodomy,” “I’m Black,” and “Ain’t Got No Grass,” less so. The show’s creators weren’t widely heard of again — James Rado and Gerome Ragni, who did the book and lyrics, and Galt MacDermot, who wrote the music. The same can’t be said for its producer and off-Broadway producing theater, Joseph Papp and his Public Theater, both of which went on to become American theater national treasures.
Hair, the Public’s inaugural show, moved to Broadway the next spring and to London in the fall, where its lengthy run (two shows short of 2000) ended only because the theater roof collapsed. Its brief and dimly lit nudity in New York was hardly scandalous, but its flagrantly parading naked people down the aisles in London represented a spectacular end to censorship in Great Britain. The 1979 film version followed, inserting a rudimentary story line into what was essentially a rock pageant.
“It’s vastly different from the stage play,” said Christopher Bayes, who is directing the Brown production. “Milos Forman did some beautiful stuff, and Twyla Tharp’s choreography is stunning. But they added a story in there that doesn’t quite exist in the play itself.
“I think the power is in the collage of culture, the bold statements that it makes,” he added, referring to such elements as anti-Vietnam War protests, civil rights marching, interracial pairing, and the long-haired counter-culture attitude in general.
Bayes, 43, knows the musical from the film, which he saw as a kid, rather than from any staging. As his bush of curly hair and goatee suggests, his politics accord with the fist-waving thrust of the show. In fact, the current political situation of the country was largely behind his suggesting the production. (Bayes is director of movement
and physical theater at the Brown/Trinity Consortium and is also clinical professor of theater, speech, and dance at Brown.)
“I said we have to find a way to encourage the spirit of idealism, particularly in an institution full of young people like this,” he recalled, “to say: ‘Look, you can do something about this, you don’t have to take it. Like sell your SUV, sell your Hummer and go by a hybrid. Make a statement in your life with the work that you do.’ ”
As for the actors briefly being naked at the end of act one in the original productions, Bayes says that element was incidental, a trivial component.
“The sexual politics of it were bold, and the controversial nudity that happens at one point,” he said, “in some ways has been so blown out of proportion. Because it was more of a big deal when it finally started touring small towns, when they would get in trouble in Indiana and Oklahoma. It was way in the back and you couldn’t really see it.”
There will be no such controversy complicating this college production and distracted from its social commentary, no “icky factor,” as Bayes put it. There are better things to encourage people to talk about in the lobby during intermission than nudity at the end of act one.
The cast of 28 is a huge one for any production, and young actors “were coming out of the woodwork” to volunteer. The appeal of belonging to a like-minded community, which Hair represents, is alive and well 40 years later. “You can work on an organic farm,” the director said. “You can’t follow the Grateful Dead anymore.”
Bayes was speaking in front of the Stuart Theater stage, which held a couple of large Bread & Puppet Theater-style papier-mâché heads and a huge full moon and clouds, onto which psychedelic digital images are projected. A challenge, he said, was to make the show come together and feel “like it fell out of the back of an old school bus driven down from Vermont. Like this group of people decided it was time to do Hair again, and they built it on their organic farm and trundled it down.”
But he has no desire to make this a quaint period piece. “We’re not peeking into a little time tunnel,” he said, adding in a squeaky old man voice: “ ‘Back in 1967 . . . ’ ”
