As you hear the opening bars of â€Aquarius’, you can’t help feeling a tad nostalgic and perhaps lucky to be seeing the Hair Broadway musical return to the stage in all its glory. While recent years have seen a multitude of revivals of musicals of the â€good ole days’, there is nothing more peculiar than seeing how far we’ve come since 1968 when this musical first premiered. No longer is dark skin, long hair, unemployment and homosexuality seen as vulgar or delinquent. These times are long behind us and as we reminisce about them, the youth of today might actually find this tale quite astonishing. But there’s nothing better than to make a song and dance about it, and in a way that makes the original writers James Rado and Gerome Ragni proud. Diane Paulus’ opus does just that. The Hair Broadway musical was first conceived in 1964 when Rado and Ragni got to know each other. The relationship between some of the characters in the play quite mirrors their own. The clash of different ideas and personalities of not only the writers but also the hoi polloi that formed the youth of America in the 1960’s served as inspiration for the script. After a few failed attempts to bring it to the audience, Hair finally premiered off Broadway in 1967 and became instantly popular even though it had a limited run of six weeks. And when it opened on Broadway in 1968, thirteen new songs were added and the plot was loosened to allow greater improvisation. It featured a cast that was one-third African American and gave equal status to both blacks and whites. For this it is considered to be one of the first musicals that gave black actors predominance on stage thus becoming path breaking. The revival that opened in the last week of March at the Al Hirschfield Theater has managed to capture the edgy, impatient aura of the premiere. The cast and crew guided by Paulus work well together while still retaining a sense of spontaneity. She ably steers the ship between the extremes of gay abandon and crippling fear, between drug induced highs and reality induced depression. By highlighting individual characters among the motley group, she succeeds in giving this rendition a dose of hitherto unexplored depth. The lightness that is so tangible in this Hair Broadway musical comes from the sound arrangements by Nadia DiGiallonardo. Though Galt MacDermot composed the original music, DiGiallonardo has experimented with a number of the tracks adding that extra zing to the already classic soundtrack. And this along with the choreography by Karole Armitage sets the musical apart from earlier revivals in its ability to keep the audience at the edge of their seats. If you want to catch all this and more, but don’t have the time or the inclination to stand in a queue outside the theatre, then book your tickets online. A number of the websites work as authorized dealers and offer great discounts on bulk tickets. As a tourist visiting New York you can also sign up for one of the Broadway tours that allow you to watch a number of popular musicals as well as takes you to some of the oldest theaters. But definitely make sure that the Hair Broadway musical is on your list. Register for one of these, for even though you might think it as a partly hackneyed celebration of the past, it serves well to show how far we’ve come.
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