Hennepin Theater Trust

"Hair," now playing at the Orpheum

I grew up with the "Hair" soundtrack. It was my parent's fault, damn them. When I was a boy, and didn't have enough money to buy my own records, but for a copy of "Kung Fu Fighting" by Carl Douglas and David Bowie's "Diamond Dogs," which I got at a garage sale, all I had to listen to were my parents' record collection. There was some Afro-Cuban jazz in there — my father liked to throw on Cal Tjader's superlative "Soul Sauce" every time he threw a party — and there was a fair amount of classical music. And there were Broadway musical soundtracks. I found myself listening to the "West Side Story" soundtrack often, and "Guys and Dolls." But I found myself returning to "Hair" most of all.

I'm still impressed by what impressed me then. The lyrics by James Rado and Gerome Ragni have a no-holds-barred satiric sensibility that's positively dizzying. The soundtrack is best remembered for the entirely unironic "Age of Aquarius," whose ditzy astrological optimism became a sort of an anthem to a generation. But I think it's better defined by its title song, "Hair," which approaches the subject of long-hairedness with a braggadocio that wouldn't look out of place on Charlie Sheen. The singer describes his hairiness in cartoonish terms, so that hippies become not just young people with long hair, but Captain Caveman-style creatures, barely visible under their manes, which house all sorts of animal life.

The lyrics fearlessly, and ferociously, promote drug use, sexual perversity, and miscegenation. In fact, the play's greatest ironic fury is leveled at the subject of race, freely making use of racist tropes to mock bigotry. And the lyrics rage against the war in Vietnam — the entire second-half is a whirlwind, if unforcused and exhausting, satiric hallucination about caricatured American icons murdering people of color in other lands.

And the music is something else. Although the production is identified as an "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical," composer Galt MacDermot very rarely attempted to write rock songs. His principal influence was the ragged, propulsive cross-rhythms of funk, and he also drew extensively from a South African genre called Kwela, also noted for its polyrhythms. He also looked to rhythm and blues and, generally for subversively ironic value, American country music and jangly Tin Pan Alley numbers. If the soundtrack as a whole is sometimes jejune, sometimes forced, and sometimes too much — and it is — it's also wildly adventurous, and what do you want from the '60s but too much? In my fantasies I sometimes like to imagine I am a product of "Kung Fu Fighting" and David Bowie. The truth is, I probably am more a product of my parent's record collection. And so be it.

Despite all this, I have never seen "Hair" staged, and, although I owned a copy of the script at one point, couldn't really imagine what it would be like. There's so much hinted at in the songs — the character Claude's desires to be an art filmmaker, while the pregnant Jeanie, who dotes on him, exhibits a nascent environmentalism. There are a lot of black characters in the musical, and they get a lot of songs, but what might they be like as characters? And there's Woof, whose polymorphous perversity includes a yen for Mick Jagger. How would the book expand on what the lyrics touch on? So I went to see the touring Broadway production, currently at the Orpheum.

As it turns out, the musical doesn't expand on these things very much at all. Especially at the start, the interstitial scenes between the songs are brief in the extreme, and the songs do all the work in introducing characters and themes. Much of the play has the feel of a revue, of skits strung together with songs. For the most part, the black performers never become full characters, except when they sing, and even then they are not so much characters as they are mouthpieces for the play's satire on racism. But, then, this is not a traditional musical, but instead the first of a relatively truncated trend called the "concept musical." This transposed one of the experiments of Off-Off-Broadway to the Great White Way:"Hair" especially borrowed from Mgean Terry's "Viet Rock," a show about soldiers going off to war that deliberately abandoned traditional narrative in favor of a sort of survey of themes.

"Hair" went wild with that, trying to compress every single aspect of the developing hippie counterculture into one play. It was so oversaturated with ideas that between "Hair's" Off-Broadway run and its move to Broadway, they had to simplify it. In the original, as an example, Claude wasn't just an aspiring filmmaker. He was a space alien.

This production is a tremendously dynamic one, and a tremendously fun one. All of it is played in front of a simple wooden scaffold (with a painted truck embedded in it), and the band performs on it, including an entire horn section, which really helps bring out the stabbing funk rhythms of the score. The cast has terrific energy and an awesome sense of sexual adventurousness — even though marijuana is the favored drug in this play, you get the sense that, instead, the cast had consumed poppers and a whole tray of oysters beforehand. Cast member Steel Burkhadt, who plays one of the two leads, Berger, has the libidinousess his porn star name suggests. He paws at both his female and male castmates, and sometimes leaps into the audience to run his hand through their hair seductive. And he's not alone in this. Woof is supposed to be the bicurious character, but everybody in the cast seems to have moved past bicuriosity to a condition I can only describe as "bisexual orgy enthusiast." Time Magazine described this production as "more daring than ever," and, holy cow, they ain't kidding. You'll never see more simulated threeways onstage, or four-ways, or, at one point, a six-way.

And thank goodness. This is a musical that is often neutered of its subversiveness, with new productions mistaking the most radical element of the play as being the few seconds of badly lit nudity the script demands, but otherwise it's treated as a pleasant nostalgic trip — the play's antiwar radicalism, for example, has become the standard viewpoint of American liberalism. This production has found in "Hair" something that can still terrify people — a vision of free love in which anybody might sleep with anybody else at any time. That's not the age of Aquarius we thought it would be.

I don't have more than a few paragraphs to talk about Theater Latté Da's production of "Song of Extinction," which is fine, as, at the moment, I don't have much to say about it, except that you should see it. I'm a bit surprised to be making this suggestion, as the play does something I think plays often do very poorly right now — deal with terminal illness. And so we have a story about a gifted musical prodigy (Dan Piering) with a dying mother (Carla Noack) and a distant father (John Middleton), and there are hundreds of plays with almost exactly this sort of set up, and they usually go miserably wrong. In them, dying ennobles the terminal patient, who dispenses wisdom as her family is brought to a theatrical state of grace by the experience.

Photo by Michal Daniel

"Song of Extinction" at The Guthrie

Anyone who has actually been through the protracted death of a loved one knows this is closer to wish-fulfillment than reality. Dying tends to make both the sick and the well miserable, and has a horrific knack at bringing out long-suppressed or dormant animosity. People can behave awfully toward each other when they are on their deathbed, or near the deathbed of another, and the experience of quietus is rarely one of grace and nobility, but terror and bewilderment. So it is to playwright E.M. Lewis' great credit that the play she gives us is closer to the reality of life's terminus than the fantasy of it. The prodigy suffers, his grades plummet, and he barely has the energy to change his clothes. The father remains distant, funneling his suffering into his efforts to prevent the extinction of a species of third-world insect. And the mother is, in essence, abandoned by these two. It's terrifically downbeat, but honestly so. And, just now, when theater's audience is aging to the point where they are likely facing their own parents' death, or their own, this approach is, to quote Time Magazine, more daring than ever.