[When I started writing this last week, it didn't seem to be connected to פסח. Once שבוע שחל בו hit, however, what could be more about freedom, springtime, anti-oppression, and leafy green vegetables than Hair?
This post is for JAR (and very well might only be appreciated by him), my partner from the dawn of history through its most recent iteration.]
I'm not sure how in this economy, but I hope Broadway ticket sales are strong through the summer. Not just for my actor-friends-of-friends, but for the chance to be able to see what is an interestingly-timed revival of the legendary musical Hair, a show that has, for pretty nonsensical and ironic reasons, found a hugely influential and revered place in my own inner-life.
(Thanks again to Google Desktop's beauty by showing me that this review on HuffPo existed.)
It is worth noting that when Hair premiered in 1968 it provided a narrative voice to a nation being clusterfucked: RFK, MLKJ, Tet, and Nixon, most famously (did I just pastiche a verse of We Didn't Start the Fire?). From all I can gather, the nation felt itself spiraling out of control in a much different way than we do today, and the revival would have been much more timely had it been released in the midst of Bush/Cheney reelection, Terry Schiavo, and the Fallujah killings (whose anniversary we just commemorated). My sense is that Hair is about a young generation's frustrations, and, at this moment in time (at least in the US), it is not the young who are down-and-out but the middle-aged - specifically (ironically?) the generation who had their future for which to fight in '68 but seem to be beaten-down and defeated by the bottom falling out of their massive bank accounts. Rent was Generation X's version of Hair (though significantly different, which I won't get into right now); I'm not sure if my generation ("the millennials") had/s one or will have one with the same impact. Perhaps our musical, as it were, is Obama.
None of this explains, of course, Hair's role in my own life (other than, well, my aversion to shaving, love of preposterous ritual excuses to not cut my hair, and general out-of-control hirsuteness). I encountered Hair at Ramah where, alongside Les Miserables, Hair stands as the greatest camp musical. It provides a compelling and relevant story and has a deeper message to accompany its profound music, unlike Cabaret, Chicago, and Mamma Mia!, and much more heft than the younger kid classics like Free to Be You and Me and the Disney shows. (I don't quite know why Joseph isn't as powerful, but it might come from its treacliness.)
Hair began, for me, as a legend; it hung heavily in the zeitgeist as the greatest expression of talent and energy of the most talented עדה anyone ever spoke about, the נבונים of '92, the giants who used to toss a frisbee effortlessly across the כיכר (which, I would realize years later, wasn't so impressive at all), a legendary basketball team (though, it's worth noting, I think '93, '94, '95, '96, '02, or '06 could have beaten them even at the height of their game), and the privilege to premiere two of Broadway's greatest (Hair and then Les Miserables) shows in consecutive summers with their divine male voices to complement the run-of-the-mill phenomenal female vocal talent at camp. The legend was amplified by dear friend Andy Abeles, whose older brother Zach was in that עדה (though I have a hard time imagining him playing a significant role among that crowd) and would become its one shining example of a positive contributor to the הנהלה (an imperfect but useful gauge of an עדה's long-term influence on camp). Camp had just started recording the musicals on VHS in '91 when we did Hair for the first time, and someone forgot to hit the "color" button on the ancient video camera; the tie-dye fest celebrating the sunshine flower children was filmed in black-and-white, a כאילו noir or serious arty flick of a (literally for me) prehistoric performance in the old בית עם, whose acoustics and ruggedness I miss dearly.
Four years after beginning to hear the legends of Hair '91, we found out that we would be the second עדה to perform the show, and it captivated our summer and provided the ur-text to my developing conception of what camp was all about. The performances were astonishing - Litwack, Chasnoff, Taxy, JAR, Nerman (Carbank), Dana, and Orlee - in their grandeur and in their understated brilliance - Howard, Betty, Gorenstein, Price, Blivaiss, the four "Hair" soloists Deanna, Zim, Hannah, and Dan - but the show was defined by the strength of our ninety-nine voices on stage, singing these songs as if we believed in them. 3-5-0-0 (translated as תשע-אפס-אפס for proper rhythm) was extraordinary, both in the girls functioning as a single unit in their words and dance and also for the best scene of faux-military combat that stage has ever seen. And the chorus numbers' power must have been truly overwhelming, as the need to turn down the volume on the recording whenever we started singing makes clear.
The show - as the HuffPo review points out - rotates around two axes: an anti-war message and an "Age of Aquarius" vision. So often in abstractly constructed situations we (appropriately) ask the question: What's this for? What's this about? Why are we here? Such is the dogged inquisition asked at Wexner Institutes and cynics like to ask the same questions at camp as well. For me, in all honesty, the question never really needed to be asked - this abstract constructions feel like home, their artificially enforced notions of community being always more compelling to me than the so-called "real" communities I lived in elsewhere. Camp was an opportunity, to borrow BJH's language, to be a part of something greater than ourselves, to play out romantic visions of teamwork, protest, resistance. To experiment with who we are and who we could be. Hair, then, provides the perfect framework for that - language and actions that resonate with either approach, the vision of an idealized life or a life operationalized (imbued with meaning) by a cause. For us at camp, it was a complex interaction of both phenomena, and I find it not ironic at all that the language of camp that, especially, was developed by Zimbler, Orlee, me, and others, grew out of consecutive summers with Grease (similarly themed but with far less at stake) and Hair. In the great moments of the life of our עדה it is clear to me without a doubt that these were the factors at play. It may very well be that we were playing with these ideas pre-Hair (though they exist also in Free to Be You and Me, our סוללים show) but Hair gave us the philosophical framework on which to hang our hats.
Five years after that legendary מכון summer (whose events, serendipitious gelling of the עדה, and staff the נבונים summer could never match), some of the key players found ourselves back together again, working on a production of Hair for our campers in '01. The core team that worked on that show, including JAR (the director and main mover-and-shaker), Thal, and OB from our עדה, created what I think was our עדה's ideal version of the show. The tricks we used, the set design, the awesomeness, was our twenty year old selves doing what David Glickman (our director in '96) could not imagine us having been capable of doing when we were kids (and maybe we weren't ready to anyway). The show we put up, however, was lacking that very goal we were all pushing towards - a recreation of our עדה, a time trip back to the magical summer of '96. The performances were outstanding, and the play grew in magnitude and scope, but it was missing the only thing we couldn't give it - us. It was the first great show in the new בית עם (opened that summer) and was as hopeless at matching up to the legend of '91 and our experience in '96 as the first time I made rocky mountain toast at home - sans dirt, sans context.
We failed at channeling, I believe, our campers instead of ourselves, just as we stood at the cusp of breaking free of the suffocating influence of our עדה and our memories to transform the baggage we carried into something constructive and value-added. That summer was a last hurrah, and, with that transition, I acquired for myself my first new עדה. In the wake of the play, some of the kids in נבונים, jealous of the inability of their own show (Little Shop) to match up to the awesomeness of Hair, and having seen our Hair during their first summer at camp years before, told our campers that their show didn't match up. It was somewhere in those next few days were, among other things, I crafted a שבת program to address this very concern, that I realized that all the theoretically beautiful educational visioning I could summon (and wow can I summon it) was worth nothing without a deep connection to the children for whom I was programming.
Time moved on, and everyone from that team left camp except for JAR and me. This past summer, for the first time since '02, an עדה put on Hair. The show was stunningly marvelous, longer and more complex than any that had preceded it. I felt my characteristic dull pain at not continuing to develop relationships with עדות, and thought the play was phenomenal but could not feel it in the way I used to. The show represented, to me, a completion of the move that began sometime after the videographer forgot to hit the "color" button before the show in '91, that took a massive lurch forward in '01 with the new sound system and walls. In '08, no parts were split, and the show was somehow even more removed from a "camp" play than Cabaret in '07, with its unfurled swastika banners that the director had not thought to take down before the curtain call. The tears streaming down the face of the magnificent child who was singing Flesh Failures and the עדה's collective decision not to take individual bows were the stuff of a new generation's legends. For me they were reminders of the rich, rich past, and the inevitability of change.
The twin themes of Hair still resonate, though I have moved from teaching and cultivating those themes to teaching how to teach and cultivate themes - a meta-move that still brings me great joy and, perhaps with the passing of enough time, will allow me to enjoy again the feelings of greatness I once knew. In the meantime, Hair is a narrative frame for the "progress" of camp (a topic for a future post) and a well I will continue drawing from for inspiration and worthwhile educational messages.
Hopefully, for the first time, I'll see it live, in English, in the fall.
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