In its original incarnation, HAIR fulfilled the crucial function of the successful musical: it captured the spirit of its time and translated it into a popular form.
Then it had the impact of a taboo-breaking social phenomenon.
Now it can be enjoyed for its enduring musical and theatrical power.
It will be difficult for a contemporary audience, experiencing it through a veil of fashionable nostalgia, to imagine a time when HAIR was dangerous cargo. Musically, it sent shock waves and marked the arrival of `rock' on Broadway.
Those involved were; avoided by taxi-drivers and spat at in the street merely because of their appearance (Australia, 1969); interrogated by police about the risk to national security posed by their subversive activities (Japan, 1970); banned in Boston and prosecuted under the Mann Act for crossing state borders with the intention of committing sedition (America, 1971). These examples merely reflect my own experiences of staging this musical; everyone involved in this highly successful and potentially alarming event emerged with startling experiences. It offered the slogans and anthems that radicalised a generation.
Yet, even then, its impact varied from place to place and from production to production. Tom O'Horgan's brilliant New York staging was streetwise and ferocious, a Broadway outing for ideas that had festered and developed in streets, attics and basements Off-Broadway for a decade. In Los Angeles, the same staging appeared even more anarchic but gentler, with a stronger `hippy' emphasis. In London, divorced from direct involvement in the Vietnam War, it exhibited an almost pre-Raphaelite romantic abandon. In this country, it was a Dionysian celebration of youth and energy - a long, overdue revenge on a reactionary, uninspired regime that had outstayed its welcome; a government prepared to sacrifice its youngest and finest in someone else's war while enforcing a provincial morality that had stifled an entire nation into a timid, soul-less conformity.
That was then, and a very different time. As for now? Well...it seems the tribes are gathering again.
HARRY VAN MOORST was a radical anti-war activist when HAIR opened in 1969. He now works as a lecturer in sociology at the Footscray Institute of Technology.
My first introduction to HAIR was via the mass media's outrage. It was obviously scandalous that such sexually obscene lyrics, lewd music and actual nudity should be permitted on stage. It was even more scandalous that it became a hit, since those who patronised HAIR were from the `respectable' adult middle class, not their hippie sons and daughters who couldn't afford such Broadway extravaganzas.
In 1969, I was living in a political `communal household' in Carlton and we managed to borrow a recording of HAIR.
I was greatly attracted to the shock value of the music. Turning the old record player up as loud as it would go, opening the first floor windows and blasting the staid Carlton neighborhood with a few verses of Sodomy or I Got Life was almost as rebelliously exhillerating as occupying the parliamentary office of Phil Lynch (Senior Liberal Cabinet Minster and strong supporter of conscription and the Vietnam war), or marching down Swanston Street to take over the National Service offices. Unfortunately, none of us could actually see HAIR. By 1969 it was already performing in Sydney but Victoria's moral guardian, Premier Sir Henry Bolte, who had already saved our souls by banning Lady Chatterley's Lover, Portnoy's Complaint, the Little Red Schoolbook and the Schoolkids' Oz (we were raided by police at 6 am one day after reprinting part of it in our newspaper), was determined to protect us from hippie degeneracy. For many of us in the 'counter culture' - whether we were hippies, yippies, political activists or simply young hedonists - HAIR represented an adult view of our world. While its music and satirical nature was appreciated and the attack on the complacency of adult values greatly enjoyed, HAIR was never really a product of the counter culture, but rather an artistic commentary on it aimed largely at those on the other side of the `generation gap. Much as I wanted to see HAIR, I would have preferred to take my beads and flower power to a Dylan, Stones or Doors concert.
When I did eventually see the stage version of HAIR, I was not disappointed. It was exciting, irreverent and rebellious - it made me feel good to be on the other side of that yawning generation gap.
Looking back two decades later, HAIR brings not only feelings of nostalgia but also an appreciation of all that has changed since then. From a banned three-minute dimly lit nude scene forming an integral part of a 'social opera' to superfluous l0-minute nudity beamed brightly all over Australia on the Steve Vizard Show - we have come a long way. Can you imagine Graham Kennedy and Bert Newtown doing this on IMT in the '60s? And for those of us who couldn't afford to see HAIR then, now is the chance to make amends.
