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What is so likable about Hair, that tribal rock musical that last night completed it's trek from downtown, via a discotheque, and landed, positively panting with love and smelling of sweat and flowers, at the Biltmore Theater? I think it is simply that it is so likable. So new, so fresh, and so unassuming, even in it's pretensions.

When Hair started it's long term joust against broadway's world of Sigmund Romberg it was at Joseph Papp's Public theater. Then it's music came across with a kind of acid-rock, powerhouse lyricism, but the book, concerning the life and times of hippie protest was a rickety  as a knock-kneed centipede.

Now the authors of the dowdy book - and brilliant lyrics - have done a very brave thing. They have in effect done away with it all together. Hair is now a musical with a theme, not with a story. Nor is this all that has been done in this totally new, all lit up, gas-fired, speed marketed Broadway version. For one thing it has been made a great deal franker. In fact it has been made into the frankest show in town - and this has been a season not noticeable for it's verbal or visual reticence.

Since I have had a number of letters from people who have seen previews asking me to warn readers, and, in the urbanely quaint words of one correspondent, "Spell out what is happening on stage" this I had better do. Well, almost, for spell it out I cannot, for this remains a family newspaper. However, a great many four-letter words, such as "love", are used very freely. At one point - in what is later affectionately referred to as "the nude scene" - a number of men and women (I should have counted) are seen totally nude and full, as it were, face.

Frequent references - frequent approving references - are made to the expanding benefits of drugs. Homosexuality is not frowned upon - one boy announces that he is in love with Mick Jagger, in terms unusually frank. The American flag is not desecrated - that would be a Federal offense, wouldn't it? - but it is used in a manner that not everyone would call respectful. Christian ritual also comes in for a bad time, the authors approve enthusiastically of miscegenation, and one enterprising lyric catalogues somewhat arcane sexual practices more familiar to the pages of the Kama Sutra than The New york Times. So there - you have been warned. Oh yes, they also hand out flowers.

The show has also had to be adapted to it's new proscenium form - and a number of new songs have been written, apparently to fill in the gaps where the old book used to be. By and large these new numbers are not quite the equal of the old, but the old ones - a few of them sounding like classics by now - are still there, and this is a happy show musically. Galt  MacDermot's music is merely pop-rock, with strong, soothing overtones of Broadway melody, but it precisely serves it's purpose, and it's noisy and cheerful conservatism is just right for an audience that might wince at Sergeant pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, while the Stones would certainly gather no pop moss.

Yet, with the sweet and subtle lyrics of Gerome Ragni and James Rado, the show is the first Broadway musical in some time to have the authentic voice of today rather than the day before yesterday. It even looks different. Robin Wagner's beautiful junk-art setting (a blank stage replete with broken down truck, papier-mache Santa Clause, juke box, neon signs) is as masterly as Nancy Potts's cleverly tattered and colorful, turned on costumes. And then there is Tom O'Horgan's always irreverent, occasionally irrelevant staging - which is sheer fun.

Mr. O'Horgan has worked wonders. He makes the show vibrate from the first slow burn opening - with half naked hippies statuesquely slow-parading down the center isle - to the all-hands-together, anti-patriotic finale. Mr. O'Horgan is that rare thing: a frenetic director who comes off almost as frequently as he comes on. Some of his more outlandish ideas were once in a while too much, but basically, after so many musicals that have been too little, too much makes a change for the good.

But the essential likability of the show is to be found in it's attitudes and in it's cast. You probably don't have to be a supporter of McCarthy to love it, but I wouldn't give it much chance among the adherents of Governor Reagan. The theme, such as it is, concerns a drop-out who freaks in, but the attitudes are those of protest and alienation. As the hero says at one point: "I want to eat mushrooms. I want to sleep in the sun."

These attitudes will annoy many people, but as long as Thoreau is part of America's heritage, others will respond to this musical that marches to a different drummer.

You don't have to approve of the Yip-Yip-Hooray roaring boys to enjoy Hair, any more than you have to approve of The Royal Canadian Mounted Police to enjoy Rose MArie and these hard working and talented actors are in reality about as hippie as mayor Lindsay - no less. But the actors are beguiling. It would be impossible to mention them all, so let me content myself with Mr. Rado and Mr. Ragni, actors and perpetrators both, Lynn Kellogg and Shelley Plimpton - one of the comparatively few holdovers from the original production - who does marvels with a lovely Lennon and McCartney-like ballad, Frank Mills.

Incidentally, the cast washes. It also has a delightful sense of self-mockery.

THE CAST

HAIR, love-rock musical, Book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, music by Galt MacDermot. Staged by Tom O'Horgan, dance director,  Julie Arenal; musical director, Galt MacDermot. Costumes by Nancy Potts; setting by Robin Wagner; lighting by Jules fisher; sound by Robert Keirnan; production stage manager, Fred Reinglas. Presented by Michael Butler; Bertrand Castelli, executive producer. At The Biltmore Theater, 261 West 47th Street.

Ron....................................Ronald Dyson
Claude...................................James Rado
Berger................................Gerome Ragni
Woof.....................................Steve Curry
Hud...........................Lamont Washington
Sheila..................................Lynn Kellogg
Jeanie.....................................Sally Eaton
Dionne................................Melba Moore
Crissy.............................Shelley Plimpton
Mother........Sally Eaton, Jonathan Kramer,
                                              Paul Jabara
Father..........Robert I. Rubinsky, Suzannah
                  Norstand, Lamont Washington
Tourist Couple................Jonathan Kramer
                                   Robert I. Rubinsky
General Grant.........................Paul Jabara
Young Recruit.................Jonathan Kramer
Sergeant..............................Donnie Burks
Parents................................Diane Keaton
                                   Robert I. Rubinsky
 
 

NOTE: This is not a full cast listing of the original Broadway cast.
 
 

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