By Albert Williams
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Also lacking is a sense of spirituality and passion–fatally so in a work that reenacts the Passion of Jesus through the sacrificial figure of Claude. While Hair doesn’t wear its faith on its sleeve in the manner of Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar (both of which it strongly influenced), it’s every bit as religious. Gerome Ragni, James Rado, and Galt MacDermot’s script and score are steeped in Catholic symbols, some of which are obvious. One of Claude’s disciples, Woof, refers to “the blood and body of Christ”; another, Berger, searches for a 16-year-old virgin named Donna and proclaims that he wears his hair “like Jesus wore it.” Even Frank Mills, the never-seen biker about whom the sweet but flaky Chrissy plaintively sings, is tattooed with the names “Mary and Mom and Hell’s Angels.” Other religious allusions are more subtle, among them the fact that many of the sung and spoken texts are structured as prayers, sermons, or litanies. (When Hair premiered, Leonard Bernstein complained that the lyrics were like laundry lists, missing entirely the fact that songs like “I Got Life,” “Ain’t Got No,” and the title tune were ritualistic recitations of attributes the characters either had or wanted–a very odd lack of insight coming from the composer of Mass.)
Hair’s simple story concerns a hippie “tribe” whose leader, Claude, has just received his draft notice. His friends–including Berger and Sheila, Peter and Mary Magdalene to Claude’s Jesus–want him to burn his draft card and resist induction. But like Christ choosing crucifixion rather than rebellion, Claude embraces his fate, seeking to discover “why I live and die” and finding the answer in a soldier’s martyrdom. Instead of a shroud, Claude ends up covered by an American flag, a symbol of all the young lives wasted in that wretched conflict and a lamb sacrificed to “the flesh failures,” as the show’s penultimate song puts it before segueing into a yearning, minor-key prayer to “Let the sunshine in.”
Performing without microphones, the actors sometimes sing to taped rock and roll; in a nice touch, they also make their own music at times, playing acoustic guitar and bongos. The singing in general has an exuberant energy that works well in some songs: “Three-Five-Zero-Zero” bursts with rousing gospel fervor, and the Supremes spoof “White Boys,” an ode to the sexual prowess of pink-faced “pickadillies,” is a delight as sung by two black women and a lissome, long-haired gay guy; he also duets with Chrissy on “Frank Mills,” turning this solo into a duet that sounds like Peter and Mary without Paul. But under Chris Staton’s musical direction the singers turn the dreamily delicate anthem “Walking in Space” into a boisterous hootenanny sing-along, and Olson and Staton turn the show’s most beautiful song–“What a Piece of Work Is Man,” a pristine setting of a speech from Hamlet–into a spoken monologue, robbing the evening of one of its most poetic moments.
George S. Buse, who died last week at the age of 74, was well-known around town as a gay activist and journalist; a writer for the old GayLife newspaper as well as Windy City Times and the Chicago Free Press, he was confined to a wheelchair in his last years but remained active with such groups as the Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Veterans of America and the Chicago Anti-Bashing Network.
