Hair

 

As a teenager much of the musical was an incomprehensible ramble expressing an adult world I may grow into, my twenties. The twenties being no more than an unimaginable horizon line just out of reach. If there was a story the characters were walking through, it was interrupted continually by their exceedingly mixed emotions, flamboyant songs obliquely connected to the dialogue, the dropping of a tab and the taking of a trip. To visit the musical over fifty years later is to peer into the world of immense energy and naïve optimism known as our twenties. Innocence is the keynote, with awareness of experience a growing reality: the musical is Blakean in that way. Hippiedom is a collective enterprise, we notice, but closer to the self-interestedness of the society being rebelled against than it would care to see. It is also provocative by definition, making light of religion, damning bellicose politics, celebrating free love, naming many kinds of sexuality overtly, mocking the stupidity of consumerist pollution, and challenging racist attitudes and stereotypes. To use the polite coinage of that time, it is counter-cultural, while in fact being subversive of respectable social conformity, to the degree that Western society soon felt the need to deride hippiedom in order to discredit its actual threat. Yet the musical is also in the nature of a burlesque revue, adopting the cool metier of acid rock to satirize its subjects and even its own subculture and it is this hybridity that is a measure of its confounding charm. Many of the songs end in questions, the sorts of questions that excite our twenties, with or without immediate answer. Some embody the idealism of the Summer of Love, while others blatantly use bleak agitprop, or are reminiscent of the ever-alert wit of Tom Lehrer. All things I would have grasped but been unable to name the first time around in my teens. Other things this time revealed the musical’s artistry. The nude scene at the close of the first half is, to follow the lysergic flow of events, more about shedding all pretences and illusions than about shedding flowery clothes. And the closing anthem (the late sixties were full of anthems) is a psychologist’s dream-come-true as absolutely everyone, cast and audience, lets the sun shine in. ‘Even the very hairs of your head are numbered, saith the Lord,’ (Luke 12:7) The fuss over hair is there from the first. Colour that returns every second generation, what line to take, the curious dictates of length, streaming, flaxen, waxen. The musical reminds us how time has no rigid rules about hair. The fame of that flame of growth touches the edges of experience. And how that flame turns over years ash-grey is a number as old as song. Nothing is the same. Youth was such a musical, in which we sang ‘hair hair hair hair everywhere hair.’