Seeing Hair again after all these years made me think of the Time Warp song and dance from another cult musical of the young and disaffected , Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show. Especially that line from the song about being spaced out on sensation like you're under sedation. Those wild Sixties days of youth in rebellion against the Vietnam War and bankrupt Establishment values as they got high on drugs, rock music and all varieties of sex were indelibly captured in the ground-breaking, and still incredibly powerful, score by Gerome [sic] Ragni, James Rado and Galt MacDermot.
Director Jon Jory's noble attempt to recreate that era's breakthrough signature musical for an audience of today brings on a feeling akin to looking at something through the wrong end of a telescope. It is all so remote and uninvolving in a time when counterculture excesses run to bombings, school and drive-by shootings, and drugs and sex that kill. That distancing is intensified by the way that most of the cast seems to have trouble inhabiting their hippie parts. For all their talk of "be-ins," they aren't very convincing when they "be" these people.
Still, David Ayers is an energetic Claude, around whom the almost plotless show revolves as he hangs out with his "tribe" and agonizes about being drafted or burning his draft card. He sings and dances well, but top singing honors go to Christine Rea, whose "Easy to Be Hard" and "Good Morning Starshine" are gorgeous, and Rachel Stern with her Janis Joplin-like riffs in "Dead End" and "Air."
Lyrics once considered shocking (as in Christopher Youngsman's "Sodomy" solo) no longer astonish. And the back-to-back "Black Boys" and "White Boys" numbers, in which girls sing of their sexual desire for boys of the other race, are so lacking in energy and in-your-face bluntness, they're almost throwaway segments. Top marks go to Liza Gennaro's choreography, which keeps the ensemble moving briskly, and Linda Cho's costumes, which look like the real thing.
