MB Hair

Last night, Barb (my partner and producer) and I saw (along with our daughter Ashley) a marvelous production of HAIR at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland. Yes, you read that right, BISHOP O’DOWD HIGH SCHOOL as in “Give the Pope a pill!” Before we went, we had joked about seeing the “40-minute version of HAIR”, and we realized, as a High School production, there would be things that simply wouldn’t get on stage (in our society, at least, you just can’t let a bunch of 16-year old teenagers get on stage naked).Â

The real questions we had were (a) whether the tribe and director would “get it” even if they had to remove some words from the script or songs and (b) whether the resulting production would even be close to authentic or be so watered down that HAIR simply didn’t remain.

Well, I would like to say that we were delightfully surprised to see that, despite the obvious limitations that one might expect from staging a mature show like HAIR at a Catholic High School, this was an amazingly good production! Director Dennis Kohles deserves accolades for staying very true to the material, even as it obviously caused discomfort in many people in the audience.

Interestingly, the Mountain Play Association, which is performing HAIR opening next week in Marin County (north of San Francisco) has advertised on their website (almost proudly) that “the song Sodomy will NOT be performed in our production!”, despite being a big professional theater company. Bishop O’Dowd didn’t shirk from this, and amazed us by presenting the song in its entirety without shame or guilt (and the young man playing Woof did a terrific job!!!)

The staging and choreography was highly authentic. During intermission, Dennis told me that many years ago he had the opportunity to work with Tadg Galleran who was in the original Los Angeles company of HAIR on another production and from that experience, he had learned much of the original choreography, which he reproduced in his current production with startling accuracy. (When they did Hair and included the blowing of the girls’ hair by the other tribe members, Barb and I elbowed each other and smiled, ditto for the rowing by the tribe during Ain’t Got No).Â

He reincorporated The Young Recruit scene only changing one line: in the original, the Young Recruit says (while parodying a woman in the audience) “Oh Harry, they already did the nude scene, can we go now?!?”, and Dennis cleverly changed this to “Oh Harry, they obviously CUT the nude scene, can we go now?!?” which got a huge laugh from the audience, most of whom probably thought Dennis added that line completely on his own, never knowing that he simply had changed the line from the original!

(By the way, the Young Recruit scene continues to strike me as one of the losses from the original script in the current version – it is one of those points where you see Claude’s gradual disaffection with the tribe and removing it leaves a large gap in the narrative).Â

There were challenges in the show, of course. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the set. Dennis and his team painted a very pretty set of hanging pieces in day-glow that looked like they might have come from posters at the Fillmore or in a headshop in the Haight (it was almost Small-Worldish, ala Disneyland, but in blacklight colors!), which hung from the battens over the stage, matching a beautiful blacklit painting on the stage, but there were no levels or other structures on stage (scaffold, platforms, etc.) to provide some break up of the flat expanse of stage (and it is a very large stage which the cast of about 40 had to fill and did admirably). The only time a real “set piece” was brought in was for the Supremes White Boys number which was very nicely staged.Â

I was disappointed that they had to (or chose to) use recorded music instead of a live band. I think live music is one of the important things in musical theatre, and in HAIR particularly, the flavor lended by a live band is very beneficial. I also understand both the cost of delivering live music (trust me, as someone funding a production like me can tell you, it is EXPENSIVE!) and the difficulty in integrating it into a production, especially one with high school student voices. However, that doesn’t change my disappointment. One benefit, of course, is that they were able to quickly adjust the volume if something happened to the audio from the performers, although this was also occasionally disconcerting (and drew attention to the recorded nature of the music).

As would be expected in a high school production, the voices weren’t always as strong as one would hope, but the entire tribe always gave it full effort and their energy more than compensated for their vocal limitations. Â

Of course, the nude scene was missing (virtually impossible to do in a high school production), as were some words which simply had to be left out of a high school production, i.e., “fucky fucky fuck”.

There were also interesting anomalies, which I am sure Dennis, if he had the time, would have been happy to explain to me. For instance, although they left two references to “nigger” (in Colored Space, done again in its entirety, and in the war scene, when the yell “niggers!” just before Abie Baby), they curiously changed 3-5-0-0 to be “prisoners in Vietnam” instead of “prisoners in Niggertown”. We weren’t sure if this was because they felt the need to make the song more understandable, or if the use of Niggertown repeatedly would be too much (although in light of performing Sodomy for a Catholic audience, its hard to see how that would be the case!)Â

They didn’t shy from any of the allusions to homosexuality/bisexuality with respect to Woof, Berger and Claude (in fact Berger and Claude were in each other’s arms a lot MORE than I saw in other productions, including the recent Fullerton production!) On the other hand, they changed several words in Ain’t Got No Grass, including curiously leaving out the word “balls” as one of the responses!

And I still hate the change that is now enshrined in the current script in the Initials. Tricky Dick simply doesn’t work as a good rhyme and I wish we could all just go back to the original song with the initials LBJ. Oh well 🙂

The best part was the ending. As anyone who read my critique of the Fullerton production knows, I was dismayed by their ending, which turned the show into a dreadfully mournful experience, ending in a dirge-like Let The Sun Shine In with no curtain call for the performers and no reprise of Let The Sun Shine In to bring the audience to its feet. Happily, Bishop O’Dowd didn’t disappoint me and the ending of the show was almost perfect, with Berger tribal dancing around Claude’s body (draped in a flag, and yes, Nina, Claude came out in FULL DRESS, not jungle battle gear!) and finally making the cross with his drumsticks over the body. The curtain call brought the audience up and there was a final hopeful reprise of Let The Sun Shine In which joined the entire tribe and audience in unison. A fitting ending to the show.

We went home happy to have seen it and thrilled that a school which might have done a second-rate production managed to do something so worthy. As I said above, kudos to the entire Bishop O’Dowd tribe!

Jon Rosen