stage matters / By William Kowinski

Hair and Other Stylings

A busy weekend on North Coast stages

(April 3, 2008)  Unlike any shows before and few since, the musical Hair was produced in several U.S. cities at the same time it was still on Broadway. I saw it in San Francisco in 1969. I had a friend in the cast, who’d been the lead in the play I wrote and directed at college a year before, a similar ‘60s-spirited extravaganza called What’s Happening, Baby Jesus? (So we were pre-J.S. Superstar as well.) We were a bit snobbish about Hair — it seemed so 1966. A year seemed like a decade then.

But now everything old is new again, especially as there’s so much linking 2008 with 1968, when Hair premiered on Broadway. That symmetry surprised director Vikki Young when Ferndale Rep decided to do a 40th anniversary production of the original American tribal love-rock musical. “Forty years ago we were embroiled in an unpopular war, there were racial issues, economic, environmental issues, and it was an election year,” she said. “Here we are 40 years later, and nothing has changed. As a matter of fact, we’ve probably stepped slightly backward.”

The original ‘Hair’ poster image that Ferndale Rep is using in their poster.

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“When I started this I had no idea that I would be so affected by this play. It is so timely — the images, the songs, the message that it delivers probably is more valid today than it was back then.”

The process of developing the production with a large, integrated cast whose ages range from 18 to 60 was particularly powerful, Young said. She found herself explaining a lot to the younger actors, like who LBJ and Margaret Mead were. On the other hand, one of the older actors is “just getting to the point where she can do the final number without bursting into tears.”

Ferndale Rep’s production begins this weekend with a preview on Thursday, April 3. It feature’s a five-piece band with musical direction by Tom Phillips, and choreography by Linda Maxwell. There will, however, be no nudity, as there famously was in the original. “At first I was going to do it, but then I thought — why?” Young said. “Back then it was done as a message — today you see nudity on national television. It’s not shocking. This is something we didn’t need to do.”

But there’s no avoiding the political themes, and the Ferndale production won’t even try. That’s certainly in the spirit of the original — it played nationally while it was still on Broadway because the producers wanted to spread its anti-Vietnam war message.

“I don’t think any of us have ever seen such excitement about a show coming to our stage,” Young said, the anticipation primarily coming from those who remember the show from its LBJ/MLK/RFK-era past. But a young, energetic cast and the show’s eerie relevance today may make it a hot ticket for the Obama generation, too.

Also beginningthis weekend, College of the Redwoods presents La Bête, a comedy in verse by contemporary playwright David Hirson. CR drama instructor Kjeld Lyth directs.

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