As I walked through Melbourne on Halloween, through crowds of people in costume that were variously camp and silly and scary or a weird mix of all three, I approached the Athenaeum Theatre on Collins Street and the crowds were gathered dressed as hippies for the opening night of the latest revival of HAIR. Celebrating Halloween was not something that happened in Melbourne when I was a kid and a lot of people of my age or older resist it as another American pop-culture import that turns an ancient celebration of harvest into another observance of capitalism. It’s more complicated than that, of course. All Hallow’s Eve is partly a Christian tradition about the remembrance of the dead.
It made me
think about HAIR as an historic artefact, though: a theatrical protest
from nearly sixty years ago that was cutting-edge in style and controversial in
content at the time, and is in some ways a nostalgia trip. As I entered the
theatre, I was in an audience filled with people cosplaying a counter-culture,
its social-significance reduced to an audience remembering a series of songs
they liked rather than the anti-war movement that birthed it.
Before the
show, black and white footage from the era is projected onto the black screen
that acts as a curtain. Pop songs from the time echo around the auditorium.
This is a precis of the time the musical is from, for people who don’t remember
or haven’t learned the history. It feels like a crutch, in a way. It’s a real
shame that someone thought the musical needed a montage and a pre-show
soundtrack to get us in the mood. You wouldn’t get this as the warm-up act for Miss
Saigon.
I was
worried that the show might feel dated, too. It was an important show when it
was first produced in the 1960s; it was the first production at the newly-formed
Public Theater in Manhattan’s East Village, which would go on to give us
genre-defining musicals as A Chorus Line and Hamilton. It tackled
themes of race, sexual freedom, drug use, pacificism, religion and criticised
American colonialism and imperialism. It soon went to Broadway and travelled the
world. It was radical in its message and captured a time and a place and the
hippie movement and helped to galvanise anti-Vietnam War sentiment all over the
world.
This brand-new
touring production by the Australian Shakespeare Company gathers many of its
regular ensemble members in a gloriously colourful production that is beautifully-sung
and captivates with its suitably quirky costumes and inventive staging. The
book of the show does date it, because it’s so-much a product of its time. For
all the free-love and openness about gender and sexuality, the female
characters are less well-defined than their male counterparts, especially as
the show centres Claude and Berger – stand-in characters for creators Gerome
Ragni and James Rado.
The songs
are a mixed-bag; it’s hard to compete in a show where “Aquarius” and “Good
Morning Starshine” and even the title-song “Hair” have transcended their
origins. But songs like “Sodomy” and “I Believe In Love” and “Black Boys/White Boys”
are still unquestionably entertaining.
It’s also impossible
to watch the show without thinking of the current political climate in the
United States, which is buckling under authoritarianism. When Claude is told he
should eat his draft card on CBS News, the history of the trusted news network
is swept aside for 2025 thoughts of Bari Weiss turning it into a propaganda arm
for the current administration. The “no kings” protest movement might be more
widespread than the anti-war movement of the 1960s, but the rule of law and the
Constitution have taken such a battering, it’s hard to know if collective
action can make much of a dent.
Because Hair is basically plotless, driven by vibes and lives-or-dies by the next song, you need a strong ensemble and a clear vision. Director Glenn Elston crafts some striking imagery. Choreography Sue-Ellen Shook delivers some energetic, lively dancing throughout. But there are sequences in the show that drag down the pace of the show, including the extended drug-trip sequence in Act Two.
The later
tableau of an American flag that stretches the height and width of the proscenium
with images of the Vietnam War projected onto it during “Three-Five-Zero-Zero”,
“What a Piece of Work is Man” and “Good Morning Starshine” is heavy-handed but
also feels transgressive. It’s an obvious takedown of the country’s
intervention in Vietnam, while also reminding us that America has never stopped
interfering when they thought they were in the right. And their arrogance continues
to this day.
Alex Cooper
as Claude is suitably charming and torn between duty and his friends’ pacifism.
Maxwell Simon’s Berger is the right mix of trippy and dippy, but the real
highlights of the show are the ensemble numbers where the energy of the whole
cast lifts everything.
I came away
remembering why I love the music of the show and thinking about how it’s
misunderstood now. A lot of people consider the finale as rousing and
unambiguously uplifting, but that’s because modern productions love to round
off the show with an encore singalong of “Let the Sunshine In”. The song is
actually called “The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In)” and while this
production does slow things down to let the tragedy land, producers can’t help but
shoehorn in a final upbeat note.
I was glad
to have seen the show again, after having first seen it in the 2010 Broadway
production directed by Diane Paulus – which had originated as part of The
Public’s Shakespeare in the Park season the year before. It’s 2025 and I’d
rather watch a show that’s wholly critical of America and its foreign policy
than to even consider watching something like Hamilton – a show I love –
that wants to celebrate the American experiment in this era where that turns
out to have been a colossal failure.
Hair is running in Melbourne until the
end of November
Photos: Ben Fon
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