Adi Wimmer: the Musical Hair

Adi Wimmer: The Musical Hair . (Published in: Helbig, Jörg and Simon Warner, eds., 2008. Summer of Love. The Beatles, Art and Culture in the Sixties. WVT, 205-16) In the late 60s and early 70s, the musical Hair influenced the generation of 17- 30 year olds like no other musical did , before or after. Hair was more than just another musical in a city that is renown for its Broadway musicals. It held out the promise of a new era, an era characterized by peace, love and harmony. Hopes for such a new era were great in 1967 as we have heard in previous papers, and they are invested in a song that has, 40 years after, a recognition value as great as the song “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.” Whenever you see a TV documentary on the 60s, or the hippies, or the anti-war movement, you are likely to hear the song “Aquarius”. (Even when one accesses the musical’s official website ( www.hairthemusical/com ) the first thing one hears is this song.) 1. From the theatrical fringe to Broadway. Hair and its social context. Hair was launched on Sept. 17, 1967. Its authors James Rado and Jerome Ragni had worked on it for roughly two years, and then they found the congenial former South African composer Galt McDermot, who “was trying to communicate the elements of freedom” in his songs (Horn 28). Their Grand Narrative was an exploration of the new “hippie” Zeitgeist. Hippiedom had made a profound impact on American culture in the previous two years; the term was first used by Michael Fallon in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sept 5 th , 1965. Following the publication of this first essay on the hippie Zeitgeist, teams of researchers went into the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, and the 1 East Village in New York to describe what was understood to be the second generation of Beats. Rado and Ragni too did field work amongst hippies, later using it as raw material for the musical. A consensus emerged that hippiedom was a counterculture made up by the children of the affluent middle class that lived in rejection of their parents’ values. Its members were first of all characterized by a general anti-establishment attitude and visually, by their long hair. The middle passage of the song “Hair” has the following lyrics: Long, beautiful, gleaming, steaming, flaxen, waxen, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, down-to-there hair, hair like Jesus wore it, hallelujah, I adore it, why don’t my mother like my haaaaaair...”. Hippies embraced all people of colour and were generally anti-racist. Most of them also displayed a liberal sexual behaviour, a drop-out attitude and quite generally smoked marijuana. Barbara Lee Horn, an authority on Hair reports that smoking of dope was a general practice fore the whole length of the Broadway run, which made productions wildly unpredictable (92). Many times, certain cast members were too stoned to appear on stage, and absenteeism was a general problem. Additional concerns included the environment, poverty, religion and a dislike of the military. The main theme however is the protest against the war in Vietnam, with anti-racism coming a close second. At one stage Hud, the black tribe member, asks: “why do white men send black men away to kill yellow men to defend a country which they stole from the red men?” In this query we find the anti-war issue intertwined with the Civil rights movement. So much for the social context. The artistic context requires some comment, too. Theatre in the 1960s was vibrant, on either side of the Atlantic. Experiments were the order of the day. In New York, an entirely new theatrical scene developed in the early 1960s that was located “off Broadway”, in Soho, Greenwich Village and the Bowery, with enterprises such as the legendary “La Mama” theatre, the “Living Theatre” and the “La MaMa Experimental Theatre 2 Company.” In Europe meanwhile, Samuel Beckett had popularized his “Theatre of the Absurd”, Grotowsky had called for a “poor theatre”, Antonin Artaud advocated a “Theatre of Cruelty”, by which was meant a theatre assaulting all senses rather than a timid, cerebral affair. Some of these ideas had already filtered into the American Musical. For 50 years, from Oklahoma in the 1920 to West Side Story (1961) musicals had followed a well-developed script. Critics however were saying this genre had exhausted itself. The alternative should be a musical whose forte was not strong plotting, but a “concept” developed in workshops by the cast as well as writers, composers and choreographers. Such a “concept musical” was launched off Broadway in September 1966 and its title was Viet Rock . This prototype owed much to Joe Papp, the creator of the New York “Public Theatre” (1965) and the annual “Shakespeare in the Park” festival, which is still an important feature of New York’s theatrical summer culture. So when the two authors James Rado and Jerome Ragni were rejected by Broadway, one producer after the other, and then miraculously accepted by Joe Papp for a limited 8 week run at his Public Theatre, a deal was quickly struck. Joe Papp’s influence can be felt in one song which borrows its words verbatim from Hamlet Act II/2, l. 261-274. Its title is “What a piece of work is man”. According to Horn, Joe Papp did not show sufficient interest to sell his production to any of the Broadway companies, and so it seemed as if the Musical was finished. But then, a second miracle occurred. One of the last shows at the Public Theatre was seen by Michael Butler, youthful scion of the exceedingly wealthy Butler dynasty of Chicago. Butler had worked with both JFK and RFK, and had (unsuccessfully) run for Congress in 1966. Butler’s pet concern was the continued mistreatment of Native Americans, and he had become aware of the production at the Public only because the original poster featured a famous photograph of Sitting Bull, Geronimo and other chieftains. Butler then secured the rights for a Broadway performance, which he himself 3 produced. Rado and Ragni, who had had endless quarrels with Joe Papp (Horn, 15), called him a “dream producer”. He gave them all the freedom they wanted, and it was his idea to introduce the term “the tribe” for the show’s cast. He also encouraged the cast to share their accommodation, their property, their food and their clothes – which was to have a disastrous consequence later for one of the spin-off productions in Cleveland (more in a moment). As artistic director he hired Bertrand Castelli, a writer-producer with a first class reputation who had worked with Jean Cocteau, Picasso and Raoul Dufy, to name but three. At the time Castelli was the director of a ballet company and he was able to bring in a number of experimentalists, including Andy Warhol (if you please) and Tom O’Horgan to “inject vitality into the precious, static, obsolete world of ballet” (Horn 37). In the winter of 1967/68 the “tribe” staged the show as it had been prepared for the premiere at the run-down “Cheetah” discotheque on 45 th Street, while at the same time rehearsing for the opening at the Biltmore Theatre on Broadway, which then happened on 29 April 1968. 2. Broadway and the public’s changed views on the Vietnam War The World Premiere at the Public Theatre of Sept. 1967 did not take New York by storm. This had more to do with the timing of the show than its inherent quality. In 1967, the country was still behind the Johnson government regarding the war in Vietnam, and the hippie counterculture so lovingly portrayed in Hair was viewed with suspicion. But on 29 April 1968 came the Broadway launch in the ‘Biltmore’ theatre, where it stayed for 1,750 performances. Only seven months had passed since the world premiere at Joe Papp’s venue, but these were months of great political change. On January 31 st 70.000 Vietcong unleashed their “TET” Offensive (Karnow 523) during which American TV viewers were 4 stunned to find that an enemy that had been described as practically defeated by their government, was able to launch an offensive throughout South Vietnam. Even the US embassy in Saigon fell into the enemy’s hands for a day. Johnson’s optimistic assessment that he had the VC “on the run” was exposed as a lie. Walter Cronkite, who at the time was generally regarded “the nation’s most reliable journalistic personality” (Karnow, 547) was representative for America’s mood swing when he went before the cameras on February 27 th 1968, declaring that it seemed “more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in stalemate.” (qut. by Karnow, ibid) On March 10, the New York Times revealed a hitherto secret plan to send an additional 206.000 troops to Vietnam, at the request of General Westmoreland. The public response was one of outrage, and Johnson was forced to scrap the plan. And on April 2 the first Democratic “primary” since TET was held in Wisconsin, in which the hitherto largely unknown peace candidate Eugene McCarthy received only 300 votes less than the incumbent president Lyndon Baines Johnson. Thus the anti- war message of Hair found a highly receptive audience. 3. Hair spreads across the nation and to Europe There were other success factors. Its refreshingly outspoken references to sex, dope and nudity turned show into instant commercial success.

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