Picture: Johan Persson
Hair at New Wimbledon Theatre, then on tour until 10 August 2019.
Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩
When the great Leonard Bernstein saw the first Broadway incarnation of Hair in 1968, he declared dismissively: “The songs are just laundry lists” and walked out.
As a critic, walking out is not an option (although some do) but had I done so when the 18-week 50th anniversary tour launched in Wimbledon, I’d have missed out on a much sharper Act II and pop classics like ‘Good Morning Starshine’ and ‘Let the Sun Shine In’ which have stood the test of time and still sound fresh.
If its songs you’re after, Hair has 47 of them (including reprises of ‘Ain’t Got No’ and ‘Let the Sun Shine In’) and while not all Galt MacDermot’s compositions (book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado) hit the button, that anthemic show opener ‘Aquarius’ still rocks.
Hair is very much of its time, the anti-Vietnam War, pro-drugs, sexual-revolution, hippie-counterculture script resonating with the public to the tune of 1,750 outings on Broadway and just under 2,000 after transferring to the West End.
The show earned notoriety for its 20-second display of full-cast nudity at the end of Act I which caused quite a ripple at the time and gave Hair the front-page publicity that guaranteed its success.
Today the same hippie scene looks tame. There are no gasps from a 2019 audience assailed on all fronts, theatre, TV and film, by nudity, the F word and worse.
Yet the British premiere of Hair had to be delayed until the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and theatre censorship were abolished. Playwrights no longer had to submit their work to be scrutinised for bad language, moral laxity or anti-authoritarian sentiments.
The show opened the day after sanctions were removed, so marks an important watershed in our theatre history. The nude scene was so short and stage so dark that American wit Jack Benny was heard to quip at the interval: “Did you happen to notice if any of them were Jewish!”
It was a better joke than anything Hair’s lyricists could come up with but the piece is not devoid of humour and the scene where Woof, nicely played by Bradley Judge, is given a poster of his hero Mick Jagger by tribe leader Claude and spreads himself lovingly on top of it on the floor, is well worth a laugh.
When the show finally started – 15 minutes after the advertised time, as was Rock of Ages at the same theatre earlier in the month – we witnessed some attractive performances from reality star Jake Quickenden as Berger and Paul Wilkins as Claude.
Daisy Wood Davis, as political activist Sheila, has the best songs and makes the most of ‘I Believe in Love’, ‘Easy to Be Hard’ and ‘Good Morning Starshine’ while the powerful voices of Aiesha Pease, as Dionne, Alison Arnopp, as the pregnant Jeanie, and Kelly Sweeney, as Crissy, dominate the ensemble numbers.
The ritual burning of draft call-up cards is the cue for another tribe member Hud (Marcus Collins) to say “the draft is white people sending black people to make war on yellow people to defend the land they took from red people”, one of the show’s most memorable lines.
There is one curious scene where the honeymooning Margaret Mead, revealed as a man when Tom Bales takes his dress off, pays a visit. What is all that about?
The trip fantasy scene where everyone is drugged up on hallucinogens is well staged and dramatic, credit to director Jonathan O’Boyle, while musical director Gareth Bretherton leads his hard-working band of five boldly from the front on keys.
It’s not the worst musical in the world and I’m glad finally to have plugged a gap on my musical theatre CV but equally glad I won’t have to sit through it again.
Jeremy Chapman
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