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Musings on Hair, in no particular order.
Feel free to comment with more, I need to flesh this out into an essay. I have more in my brain but it's a bit late to continue.
Potential spoilers.
Hair
Geilgud Theatre, 15/04/10
There is a plot of sorts, but it seems to be the least prioritised aspect of the show, coming somewhere behind the shape and design of the Persian rugs on the stage. Singing, dancing and being stoned top the list.
It seems to me that it would help a great deal with ‘getting’ the show if you took the same drugs as the writers. Maybe I am inhibited by my lack of culture and experience – all I know of the hippy movement is a couple of afternoons spent wandering around Glastonbury, watching Scooby Doo and a half remembered viewing of We All Live In a Yellow Submarine, and the sum total of my knowledge of the Vietnam War comes from watching Forrest Gump and reading Hearts in Atlantis.
The cast are unquestionably talented, and pour themselves into the show with great enthusiasm and little inhibition. They are all impossibly perfect, except for the token fat girl(no really, she doesn’t do anything in particular, she’s just there.), and even she looks fine naked for the dimly lit 30 second long love-in at the end of Act 1.
Any part of the show would come out of context with no trouble, but all the parts suggest a greater cohesiveness of the whole than there actually is.
Claude’s hallucination was lengthy and pointless. Perhaps this is accurate to hallucinations in general, but there doesn’t seem to have been much care for theatre in the creating of it – the hallucination is a common enough device in musical theatre, but it is usually included to demonstrate something, or at least tie into the rest of the plot. Aside from general angst about soldiers, none of it makes any sense or connects to anything else in the show, unless you count George Washington(or was it Abraham Lincoln?) being a black woman a representation of the placard someone later holds up that reads “I met God… and she’s black”. The hallucination in All You Need Is Love(a show in which brilliant arrangements of Beatles songs were sung and danced to but, due to legal restrictions, contained no dialogue or named characters) made more sense than this. At least that had The Man in the Brown Suit sitting on a 30’ high chair singing ‘Help!’, accurately(if crudely) demonstrating the lyrics, and began with ‘Good Day Sunshine’.
The named parts are not really characters as such. Though they all introduce themselves, they sing a song and then melt back into the ensemble. While this is nothing out of the ordinary – it’s pretty much how The Wild Party fills 2 hours – there is something unsatisfying about the way they identify themselves, as if for future recognition, then do nothing.
It is somewhat brain-breaking to hear Gavin Creel, Bert of Mary Poppins acclaim, put on an unconvincing Manchester accent in order to sing ‘Manchester, England’. It’s lovely to see him back on the stage though, however confused and confusing his character may be. Claude is pretty much the only character in the show (though Berger comes close), as opposed to named ensemble, as he is the only one who has any sort of story or character development. It’s disjointed and contradictory, though. In the first half of the show, there’s no implication or suggestion that he is at all half-hearted about being a flower-powered hippy starchild – he makes the lofty claim that he IS Aquarius – who is ideologically opposed to the Vietnam War and the Draft, whilst explaining that it doesn’t mean he’s unpatriotic, yet after refusing to burn his draft card(extreme, illegal and understandable that someone would be hesitant) he refuses any and all options his friends come up with to get him out of deployment, joins the army, presumably gets shot, and ends up dead.
In the last sequence, there are a few things just thrown away. Claude’s mother kisses his army uniform goodbye rather than her son – a moment that could have been heart-wrenchingly poignant if only it had been set up with some forethought. Somehow the combination of the cheerful bright music, the fact that we don’t actually see Claude die, the fact that we’ve had very little time to recognise the slick-haired soldier in the rather too large uniform as Claude in the first place, and the fact that there’s obviously something going on behind that big clump of people that they don’t want us to see contrive to make his death quite undramatic and almost unintentional. The cast’s exit up the aisles of the stalls doesn’t look so much like a funereal march as them buggering off to the pub because with the dreamer dead, the dream stops. Though perhaps that’s being generously poetic. The most shocking thing in the last 5 minutes or so of the show is the realisation that he really was wearing a wig the whole time.
There is a charming little vignette where a starched, middle aged, conservative looking couple come up to the hippies and ask them to explain their ideology and why on earth they all have such long hair. Clearly, they are an avatar of the audience itself, but they are actually believable as characters because they don’t act like stereotypes. They listen amiably as Berger explains that he just likes the feel of hair on his neck(and rambles on about it in song for about 3 minutes), before decreeing that yes, flamboyant plumage is the norm in nature for males of many species, all teenagers should be free to become who they want to be and not be railed in by their parents or society at large, and the woman isn’t actually wearing a dress under her coat. And is a man. If more of the show had been like that, there might have been a stronger narrative thread holding it all together.
I did get an odd pang of longing when other people were up on the stage dancing at the end, but not enough to want to join them. I think maybe I wanted the show to be more than it was, or perhaps in one of my many previous lives I was an uptight square who really kinda wanted to be a hippy but didn’t dare.
Potential spoilers.
Hair
Geilgud Theatre, 15/04/10
There is a plot of sorts, but it seems to be the least prioritised aspect of the show, coming somewhere behind the shape and design of the Persian rugs on the stage. Singing, dancing and being stoned top the list.
It seems to me that it would help a great deal with ‘getting’ the show if you took the same drugs as the writers. Maybe I am inhibited by my lack of culture and experience – all I know of the hippy movement is a couple of afternoons spent wandering around Glastonbury, watching Scooby Doo and a half remembered viewing of We All Live In a Yellow Submarine, and the sum total of my knowledge of the Vietnam War comes from watching Forrest Gump and reading Hearts in Atlantis.
The cast are unquestionably talented, and pour themselves into the show with great enthusiasm and little inhibition. They are all impossibly perfect, except for the token fat girl(no really, she doesn’t do anything in particular, she’s just there.), and even she looks fine naked for the dimly lit 30 second long love-in at the end of Act 1.
Any part of the show would come out of context with no trouble, but all the parts suggest a greater cohesiveness of the whole than there actually is.
Claude’s hallucination was lengthy and pointless. Perhaps this is accurate to hallucinations in general, but there doesn’t seem to have been much care for theatre in the creating of it – the hallucination is a common enough device in musical theatre, but it is usually included to demonstrate something, or at least tie into the rest of the plot. Aside from general angst about soldiers, none of it makes any sense or connects to anything else in the show, unless you count George Washington(or was it Abraham Lincoln?) being a black woman a representation of the placard someone later holds up that reads “I met God… and she’s black”. The hallucination in All You Need Is Love(a show in which brilliant arrangements of Beatles songs were sung and danced to but, due to legal restrictions, contained no dialogue or named characters) made more sense than this. At least that had The Man in the Brown Suit sitting on a 30’ high chair singing ‘Help!’, accurately(if crudely) demonstrating the lyrics, and began with ‘Good Day Sunshine’.
The named parts are not really characters as such. Though they all introduce themselves, they sing a song and then melt back into the ensemble. While this is nothing out of the ordinary – it’s pretty much how The Wild Party fills 2 hours – there is something unsatisfying about the way they identify themselves, as if for future recognition, then do nothing.
It is somewhat brain-breaking to hear Gavin Creel, Bert of Mary Poppins acclaim, put on an unconvincing Manchester accent in order to sing ‘Manchester, England’. It’s lovely to see him back on the stage though, however confused and confusing his character may be. Claude is pretty much the only character in the show (though Berger comes close), as opposed to named ensemble, as he is the only one who has any sort of story or character development. It’s disjointed and contradictory, though. In the first half of the show, there’s no implication or suggestion that he is at all half-hearted about being a flower-powered hippy starchild – he makes the lofty claim that he IS Aquarius – who is ideologically opposed to the Vietnam War and the Draft, whilst explaining that it doesn’t mean he’s unpatriotic, yet after refusing to burn his draft card(extreme, illegal and understandable that someone would be hesitant) he refuses any and all options his friends come up with to get him out of deployment, joins the army, presumably gets shot, and ends up dead.
In the last sequence, there are a few things just thrown away. Claude’s mother kisses his army uniform goodbye rather than her son – a moment that could have been heart-wrenchingly poignant if only it had been set up with some forethought. Somehow the combination of the cheerful bright music, the fact that we don’t actually see Claude die, the fact that we’ve had very little time to recognise the slick-haired soldier in the rather too large uniform as Claude in the first place, and the fact that there’s obviously something going on behind that big clump of people that they don’t want us to see contrive to make his death quite undramatic and almost unintentional. The cast’s exit up the aisles of the stalls doesn’t look so much like a funereal march as them buggering off to the pub because with the dreamer dead, the dream stops. Though perhaps that’s being generously poetic. The most shocking thing in the last 5 minutes or so of the show is the realisation that he really was wearing a wig the whole time.
There is a charming little vignette where a starched, middle aged, conservative looking couple come up to the hippies and ask them to explain their ideology and why on earth they all have such long hair. Clearly, they are an avatar of the audience itself, but they are actually believable as characters because they don’t act like stereotypes. They listen amiably as Berger explains that he just likes the feel of hair on his neck(and rambles on about it in song for about 3 minutes), before decreeing that yes, flamboyant plumage is the norm in nature for males of many species, all teenagers should be free to become who they want to be and not be railed in by their parents or society at large, and the woman isn’t actually wearing a dress under her coat. And is a man. If more of the show had been like that, there might have been a stronger narrative thread holding it all together.
I did get an odd pang of longing when other people were up on the stage dancing at the end, but not enough to want to join them. I think maybe I wanted the show to be more than it was, or perhaps in one of my many previous lives I was an uptight square who really kinda wanted to be a hippy but didn’t dare.
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