HAIR revival- Page 3

[Carl Magnum]

Posted: 1/21/07 at 3:19am

"Emo edge"? Nothing about emo has an edge, emo is for pussies. Emo and HAIR is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Agree with Bennett, sounds interesting but just friggin awful.

[mediakilled]

Posted: 1/22/07 at 9:14pm

i'm involved in a performing arts school production of it now in the nyc area.
.
set in 2008. the 'tribe' are soldiers going thru post traumatic stress..in an asylum..very'one flew over the cuckoos nest' the songs are done in flashback, dream sequences,..or in current future-yearnings.thoughts...it is pretty abstract...but makes all the sense. we adress Iraq and today's problems with projection, etc.

3-5-0-0 makes alot of sense since thats the total of US soldiers gone (almost).
we open in april in the nyc area...maybe you should come check it out.
only thing is that it is abridged.....not all the songs are in it because it needs to be around 90 minutes-because it will be showcased at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh...this summer...and thats the time limit we have.

Drug use is still prevalent but it is today's drugs....in a way. It takes a stab at pharmaceutical companies, medicinal drugs..not recreational. no words have been changed....just interpretation. The moms and dads and authoritative figures are replaced by Doctors and nurses in the asylum.
the only obvious change is that LBJ has been changed to GWB.
and LSD is now XTC.

but all in all...it needed to be changed to make sense to the younger audiences of today..and the music is still intact...just more rock.

[Michael Bennett]

Posted: 1/22/07 at 9:51pm

It sounds like a cross between Anne Bogart's inmate version of SOUTH PACIFIC (done at NYU in the early 80s) and John Doyle's SWEENEY (by way of Peter Hall's MARAT/SADE).

How do you handle the draft if its set in 2008. Are these Vietnam vets or Iraq soldiers fantasizing about the 60s?

Again, it sounds like an interesting experiment but not really HAIR.

[mediakilled]

Posted: 1/23/07 at 12:29am

Since the draft is 'supposedly' threatening to be reinstated. having it set in 2008 makes it believable that it is happening and therefore Claude's decisions of buring his draft card are addressed in Hare Krishna. as a nightmare. These 'patients' are dealing and suffering with all the ramifications of war...the thoughts, the draft, the lives lost..and sing about their ideologies.
Marat/sade defenitely hits it on the nail.

it does make for an interesting piece.
but there's no way the 'hippie movement' would even be relatable now to the current generations, or the cast if that....so it's taken new form and makes it abit more haunting and 'disturbed'.

and its approached more like a 70's psychological thriller film (clockwork orange, one flew over the cuckoos, coma) that kind of genre.

it's defenitely fun to work on.

and it is amazing that these lyrics and words can fit so easily.
When some 60's slang doesn't make sense...the patients still verbalize it..but since they are 'disturbed patients'...it sits in the room to make sense. and somehow it magically fits.

It's pretty fascinating actually.

[BroadwayGirl107]

Posted: 1/23/07 at 10:45pm

I'm bumping this a little because I see Broadway Local posted about Tisch's production of the show.

I wouldn't call what they did with the music anything even remotely resembling emo in the slightest bit. I remember saying it was turned into something more like what you'd hear on a Nine Inch Nails CD. That's a really poor description of it, but if you could imagine them taking the music into that realm of sound. More like metal or heavy punk. And sometimes it was just spacy and boring. Personally, I think what they did with the music made the whole damn thing seem angry and cynical and like this was being shoved in our faces (Berger skipped around condescendingly to an obnoxiously childish sounding arrangement of "I Got Life").

The whole production was just not in the spirit of the show. The set looked like some sort of mental institution and the characters appeared to be a sort of ignorant, homogeneous (since all of them had crew cuts--a potentially interesting piece of irony the production completely ignored--and wore very similar costume, you could barely tell who was who. Not very good for a show that could use some help with character development) cult rather than a group of politically aware young adults.

Interesting but God awful pretty much sums it up. I don't understand why people try to completely re-invent Hair to the point that they don't even connect with the spirit of the show to begin with. Shouldn't they be making new shows if they're going to ignore what the show's about?

[SDav 10495]

Posted: 1/23/07 at 11:06pm

mediakilled...I was just thinking how I hoped to catch your production this April, and then I saw that you were taking it to the Fringe Festival this summer and jumped--I am going to be taking a production to Edinburgh as well! (I'm currently in Little Shop, which we are not bringing, and I'm still in the dark about what exactly we will be bringing--seems like it may be a play compiled from a number of short stories.) Your Hair sounds pretty...well, strange, but without a doubt something I'll have to catch when I'm over there.

[feinstein9]

Posted: 1/24/07 at 12:19am

so the ipod babies don't care? why so cynical. so there isn't a youth movement underway. so our music does not reflect anything about who we are (save "american idiot" and a few other records). so there are no protests. so we have no real identity other than what the adults chose to label us with- ipods and myspace and that old fallback mtv. but you know what? we still care. about war and peace and politics. no one's covering it. big news in the '60's, to have marches and what not. i'm in anti-war club called Students for a Democratic Society at my school, fourty members strong, and we take every opportunity we have to march and protest. no, it's not as wide spread as it was the yesteryear. there haven't been any significant college protests, ala berkley. i think this is mainly because the war hasn't affected us on the scale that Veitnam did. there was a draft, that caused people to act up. to care more. given, most of the protest songs were actually before the draft was instated, which does give me pause. are we really not as socially conscious? are we really as self-entitled as adults want us to think? and if so, who is to blame, since we are you children? we were born in the greedy '80's. into a culture that embraced commercialism and capitalism like no other. i wish my generation had more forecfully rejected those things, as yours rejected the falseness of the '50's. yes, we want "things" but i don't think we're, by and large, a selfish people. maybe we see what we wanna see. but to bring things more on topic, it's worth saying that the majority of people i know are facinated by the '60's era. me more so than most, basicly all the music i listen to from that time, i dress and decorate somewhat in the flower child/psychedelic/eastern spirit. i just finished reading "ready steady go: the rise and fall of swinging london." so maybe it's just me and the people i get to know, since i do go to art school. but it seems like everyone i meet loves bob dylan and (the beatles go without saying), the stones, zombies, kinks, etc. i even have met a few who know who love (the band) and ravi shankar are! everyone's read the electric kool-aid acid test. and to whoever said people don't do lsd? it's very true that it's not the scale that it was (unfortunatly... god bless ken kesey and tim leary, as different as their approaches were) kids are still doing it. go to any outdoor rock concert and you'll see what a mean, e.g. bonaroo. college kids will always love acid, shrooms, and pot, because that's the way they're wired. to bring things even further on topic, everyone i've played "hair" for has loved it and asked for copies (i tell them to buy it, of course). "hair" doesn't need to change. that's the long and the short of it. "hair" in as prestine condition as we can retrieve it is what we need. "hair" as a true artifact of the time. that's what rings true. dated? no. a product of its time. a beautiful product. kids are responding to those things right now, those authentic pieces of the era. an update would never make sense, not just because LBJ isn't the president or because "hare Krishna" doesn't make sense unless there's a surgence of eastern religion in popular culture. it doesn't need an update because it's already great. i would *love* to see the script to the original off-bway production. joe papp made a big mistake when he sold off all of his connections to it. i don't think he'd let it get as muddled as it did. even muddled it's great, though! anyway this is a very long post only to say, don't stereotype my generation, and don't change "hair." hare krishna!

[BroadwayGirl107]

Posted: 1/24/07 at 9:32am

"so the ipod babies don't care? why so cynical. so there isn't a youth movement underway. so our music does not reflect anything about who we are (save "american idiot" and a few other records). so there are no protests. so we have no real identity other than what the adults chose to label us with- ipods and myspace and that old fallback mtv. but you know what? we still care. about war and peace and politics."

Oh God no. For every one kid in this generation that cares about politics, there are 1,000 that are completely apathetic and could not care less. And in that group of kids that care, there's probably one in a hundred that would actually join some sort of group in school, speak up for their beliefs in front of a class of students who believe differently or are just apathetic, or engage in a protest.


And just because kids these days are fascinated by the 60s, love pot, and desperately try to pretend they'd fit into the 60s, it doesn't mean they have any real connection to what was happening in that era. It's just a generation latching onto an older generation's trends because this one lacks the passion or the originality to do something new for themselves.

Does Hair need to change because of it? I don't think so...I actually think the pretentious kids who like to pretend they're hippies would love it...they might even get an impulse to speak out politically from it. But I do think reviving the show would take an extreme amount of care in order to be something genuine.

[Dirty_Rotten_Guy]

Posted: 8/20/07 at 10:54pm

Well, wanted to revive this thread because a HAIR revival would be cool, and according to IBDB, there hasnt been a revival of the show since 1977
Its been really interesting read all the opinions on this thread, by the way

But anyways, I was thinking about it, and from what I remember hearing, during "Let the Sunshine In" (or one song in the original production), the whole cast got naked and was dancing around and such. So I wonder, if they did a production on Broadway today, if they'd do that. Broadway is definitely more touristy now so thats a drawback, but with some nudity in shows like SPRING AWAKENING, THE FULL MONTY, TAKE ME OUT...you know, there might be nudity in a new production. I dont know, what does everyone else think?
Haha, kind of an odd question, sorry...

[Michael Bennett]

Posted: 8/21/07 at 12:23am

The Nudity was very, very brief and very dimly lit in the original production - it happened for about ten seconds at the end of the first act ("Where Do I Go"). The cast was clothed (more or less) for "Let the Sunshine In."