T Minus 7 Days: Load-in started early!

We got great news on Thursday that we could move into the theater three days early. As a result, Friday and Saturday were a flurry of activity. We got our set moved in yesterday and it is at least in "rehearsable" condition for Sunday.

More on this soon!

T Minus 10 Days: We're 420-friendly!

Quite appropriate for the musical HAiR, we have sold 420 tickets as of today!

Everybody light up!

Peace,

Jon

T Minus 15 Days: Time Keeps On Slippin', Slippin', Slippin...

Wow, it is already Friday, June 29th, and I have so much to catch up on!

Today, we did our second public appearance. This one was at the San Jose Farmer's Market on San Pedro Street. We performed right in front of Theatre on San Pedro Square where we will open in just two weeks(!!!!!). Some of the tribe couldn't make it during a work day, but it was still pretty exciting.

Dennis Dentoni, who is the understudy for Claude, filled in for Brennan Whitaker, and Ester Selk substituted for Adena DeMonte as Jeanie and both did a great job! Sammy Rodriguez (Berger), and Michelle Wynn (Sheila) were in superb form and Lonnique Genelle was again fantastic as Dionne singing the opening number Aquarius.

The crowd was mostly walk-bys shopping in the street at the market, but we had a goodly number of people stop and listen. We handed out hundreds of cards and I am sure some of those will turn into ticket sales. People seem to like being handed something by an actor in a show. I guess it gives them a personal connection to the show.

I am way behind on how things have been going in rehearsal, but suffice it to say that over the past two weeks, we blocked the show in its entirety and yesterday we ran Act 1 in something I call a "stumble-through" (as opposed to a "run-through"). The name says it all.

Amazingly enough, this was one of the best "stumble-through"s I have ever done! The tribe pretty much new what to do, and while we did have to start-and-stop a number of times to rework things (pretty much expected after you have just done initial blocking) it didn't take long. The actual running time of Act 1 including start-and-stops, but not including the warm-ups, a mid-act coffee break and notes at the end was about 1:40, which is pretty good for an act that should take 1:20 when it is polished. We should easily achieve that!

In addition, the singing is getting better and better every day. Katie Coleman, who joined us a number of weeks ago as vocal director, has done a terrific job of bringing the vocals together. In last night's rehearsal and today's performance, harmonies were easily heard in most of the songs.

We got in a shipment of equipment this week, including our wireless hand-held microphones as well as some new-fangled LED lighting fixtures which are designed to provide colored stage washes (much like a cyc light) but using a fraction of the power. Our tech director Joey Brennan thinks they are really cool!

I am going to try (and I know I've promised this before :-( ) to blog every day the rest of the way and hopefully it will all be good news! Ticket sales, while still not astronomical, keep going up. We have almost hit $6,000 and 300 tickets sold, and that is good. As I mentioned in a previous post, we didn't hit these numbers until well into our final week before opening Tomfoolery, and our numbers are climbing at an increasing rate. We are hoping to head into the opening week (i.e., a week from now) already close to $10,000 in sales. More important, we want to sell out our opening performances (July 14 and 15) because those are the dates that word of mouth will really take hold. The more people who come to see the opening weekend, the better draw the show will be the rest of the run.

See you all soon at HAIR!

T Minus 22 Days: PRIDE Tomorrow!

Come join the Muwekma Hair Tribe at San Francisco's 2007 Pride Celebration. We will be performing on the mainstage at 1:50 PM behind City Hall. For more information, see www.sfpride.org.

We will perform:

Aquarius
Sodomy
Hair
Easy To Be Hard
Where Do I Go?
The Flesh Failures/Let The Sun Shine In

More on our performance on Sunday!

Peace,

Jon

T Minus 30 Days: Still a Trickle, But Definitely Heading Up!

Every producer watches, watches, watches... did we sell any tickets today? Still four weeks out from our opening night, our ticket sales are just a trickle. We don't expect any big upturn until July 1, when our full ad campaign has kicked in and we have hopefully gotten some more word of mouth.

With that understanding, it is still cool to note that this week, our ticket sales made a definite turn upward this week. Sales have been trickling in since the end of March (even before Barb and I made our trek to New York to visit the Hair Archives) when we sold our first tickets. We have had generally consistent week-to-week sales of a few hundred dollars, but this week, things almost doubled. Here is the chart of weekly sales:

Week     Weekly Cumulative
31-Mar     $164   $  164
7-Apr       293      457
14-Apr      245      702
21-Apr      300    1,002
28-Apr      144    1,146
05-May      150    1,296
12-May      155    1,451
19-May      240    1,691
26-May      460    2,151
2-Jun       475    2,626
9-Jun       420    3,046
16-Jun      735    3,781

The early effects of our ad in the San Jose Rep's Nixon's Nixon program showed up through April 14, but after that, sales slumped a bit for a few weeks, then started going up again as word of mouth from the cast and distribution of flyers and posters started. The sudden uptick this week is a little unexpected. We didn't do anything this week to suggest that would happen, so it must be happening purely by the effects of cumulative word of mouth and distribution of materials. In the next few weeks, though, a series of ads will start to break:

1/2 page program ad for Los Gatos' Jazz on the Plaz (which runs all summer)
1/2 page program ad in American Musical Theater's All Shook Up
Full page program ad in San Jose Rep's Ella
1/4 page ad in Out Now Magazine
Smaller ads in The Metro and The Wave
A full page ad in Discover San Jose (July), along with an article and pictures!

This is going to be the widest ad campaign we've ever run. In addition, we will probably get a significant amount of non-paid publicity from our local papers, and maybe even a few papers farther afield (Bay Area Reporter is interested in doing an article on our show).

It will be interesting to see how sales track over the four weeks leading up to our opening. An interesting comparison is our week-to-week sales for Tomfoolery:

Week     Weekly Cumulative
9-Sep    $  140  $  140 
16-Sep*     347     487
23-Sep      482     969
30-Sep      647   1,616
7-Oct     2,401   4,017
14-Oct    2,473   6,490 
21-Oct    3,652  10,142
28-Oct    4,191  14,333
4-Nov       788  15,121

Opening Saturday for Tomfoolery was October 14, and opening Saturday for Hair is July 14, so the dates correlate very closely. In fact, the week marked September 16 (with the asterisk) is essentially the same week as June 16, the most current week in the Hair table. That means, at the same point as we were for Tomfoolery (4 weeks out), we have sold TEN TIMES as many dollars worth of tickets for HAIR. And we didn't hit $3750 dollars in total sales for Tomfoolery until very late in the week ending Oct. 7. So we are FAR ahead of where we were in our last production.

Pretty cool, for sure!

Of course, we have no way of knowing what will happen as we get closer to opening, and we also have no idea what will happen after we open. But the show is already demonstrating its power as a draw. Other companies have experienced the same thing. Sacramento's Artistic Differences company sold out almost there entire run by the second weekend of their show. Mountain Play has been selling over 3000 tickets a performance for its Sunday afternoon performances. We need about 1.5 times ONE PERFORMANCE of their ticket sales to sell out our entire run!

Stay tuned, the rocket ship is just starting to leave the launch pad!

Jon

T Minus 34 Days: Talkbacks With Michael Butler and Original Cast Members

We are really proud to announce that we will be having a number of audience talkback sessions both before and after performances of HAiR at Theatre on San Pedro Square.

Michael Butler

Opening weekend, there will be two opportunities to participate in a talkback with Michael Butler, the producer of the Broadway production of HAiR (and many of the other first-run regional productions) as well as the 1979 movie with Treat Williams. Other members of first-run HAiR tribes may join in these talkbacks.

July 13, 8:00 PM (Preview) after the performance

July 15, 2:00 PM (Matinee) after the performance

Walter Michael Harris and Jonathon Johnson

On the third weekend (July 27-29), two members of first-run HAiR tribes will join us for audience talkbacks. Walter Michael Harris was in the original production of HAiR on Broadway, singing the beautiful What A Piece Of Work Is Man with Ronnie Dyson in the show and on the original cast album. Jonathon Johnson, who later performed with The New Christy Minstrels, and also wrote the book Good HAiR Days about his experiences with the show, was in the Seattle, Chicago, Miami and Mercury Tour tribes of HAiR playing Woof. He concluded with 6 months in the Broadway cast, playing Claude in the closing Broadway performance.

July 27, 8:00 PM (Walter Michael Harris only) after the performance

July 28, 8:30 PM (Walter Michael Harris and Jonathon Johnson) after the performance

July 29, 1:30 PM (Walter Michael Harris and Jonathon Johnson) before the performance

We will be adding additional talkback sessions as we confirm with former tribe members and other participants of the wonderful world that encompasses those who have been involved with this remarkable show.

Jon

T Minus 35 Days: Jonathon Johnson Rocks!

I had to put the embarrassment of missing almost 3 weeks on this blog behind me and sit down and do this today. As someone who is modestly ADD, I can easily get into a spiral of procrastination on certain things, especially if I have missed a few milestones. Each day becomes a bigger hurdle and makes it harder to get back to it. Sigh...

However, after this weekend, I HAD to put a stop to it and get this blog back on track. We are now five weeks out and I will try to post a recap of the past few weeks when I can, but this weekend demanded documenting and so here I sit, finally making the effort and doing it.

This past weekend, the Muwekma tribe had the phenomenal experience of meeting and visiting with Jonathon Johnson, the author of the book "Good HAiR Days" (one of only four books I have come across that are specifically about HAiR, the others being Mary Lorrie Davis' book Letting My HAiR Down, Barbara Lee Horn's academic treatise The Age of "Hair": Evolution and Impact of Broadway's First Rock Musical, and director Scott Miller's book Let The Sun Shine In).

Jonathon grew up in Seattle and was a budding rock and roller in the late 1960s. He graduated high school in 1969 and started looking for something to do. He stumbled onto HAiR, which was about to open in Seattle, and it changed his life in many ways. He ended up playing in several companies of HAiR, including Seattle, Chicago, Miami, many stops on the Mercury Tour, before finally closing the show on Broadway in 1972. During that time he principally played Woof, but in the end, he was the last Claude to appear in the first-run Biltmore Theatre production, on July 1, 1972.

We were introduced to Jonathon by Nina Machlin-Dayton of the HAiR Archives and her description of Jonathon as one of the most gracious and wonderful men she has ever met was, if anything, an understatement. I had read Jonathon's book early in the process of deciding to do HAiR and I already knew much about him, including the unbelievable ordeal he went through in losing his wife and one-year-old daughter to an arsonist-caused fire at their hotel while performing as Woof in the Cleveland stop of the Mercury Hair Tour. I felt like I already knew this man, both his pain and his eventual triumph over it as he put his life back together. I couldn't really believe I might have the opportunity to meet him, let alone share more than a few moments with him.

After Nina's introduction, I contacted Jonathon by email and asked if he might be willing to come to see our show when we opened and possibly participate in an audience talkback session after the show. I pointed out that we couldn't really afford anything in the way of an appearance fee, and was overwhelmed when Jonathon responded saying that he would never consider taking a fee for what he considered a labor of love, and that all he asked was to cover his basic expenses. He then offered to come up TWICE, once for the show and once to talk to the tribe during our rehearsal period.

Fortunately airfare from San Diego to San Jose (thank you Southwest Airlines!) is relatively inexpensive. Hotels however, can be expensive, and Jonathon had offered to stay wherever we could afford, not to worry. In an attempt to keep expenses down, I tentatively extended an offer to him to stay at our home and he graciously accepted!

Friday night, Barb and I had to do our last duty as house ushers/box office at Bobbi Fagone's Thunderbabe at Theatre on San Pedro Square. After the show started (we had already seen it three times and decided that was sufficient - it was good, but not something we really wanted to see a fourth time), we had dinner at Speido near the theater. As we sat there, we chatted about what was upcoming for the weekend. We certainly had good feelings from our email exchanges with Jonathon, but as the time to pick him up at the airport drew near, we realized that we certainly couldn't be sure how it would go. We also wondered how the tribe would take to spending time with this man who was not part of our relatively tightly knit group.

On Saturday morning, we had to put the finishing touches on the house (we had just redecorated my son's bedroom after he left for his punk rock band's summer tour of the country - see Arsonists Get All The Girls). Barb went shopping for dinner for the tribe and I drove to San Jose Airport. Jonathon's plane arrived on time and as soon as I saw him walking up the corridor (I easily recognized him from the picture on the back of his book), I waved and he came up to me and gave me a hug. I pretty much knew from that moment that this was going to be an incredible visit.

We stood at the baggage claim waiting for his luggage and in less than 10 minutes we were chatting about things as if we had been friends for years. I have rarely met anyone who made me feel so at ease so quickly (well, recently this is becoming a quite common occurrence when it comes to members of the HAiR "family" as that seems to be the norm judging by our experiences in Los Angeles and New York and Massachusetts!)

We talked about the 60s, the current world situation and of course, HAiR. Jonathon clearly shares many of my views about why HAiR's message is so important today, and as a former first-run tribe member, and someone who personally knows (knew) Gerry Ragni, Jim Rado, Galt MacDermot and Michael Butler, he is passionate about the show remaining true to its spirit and its roots.

We drove back to the house and never stopped talking. In fact, I can say that except for a few hours of sleep Jonathon finally submitted to that evening, we never stopped the discussions until Barb drove him away to take him to his return flight.

The tribe started arriving around 6 PM and we put the food on the grill (Barb made mountains of shish kabob along with corn, garlic bread and salad). I never saw Jonathon stop engaging with groups of tribe members. Later in the evening, I sat at the piano and played for some of the tribe who wanted to sing and we got the whole group warmed up and sang several songs from the show for him. Towards the end, we implored him to sing for us and while declining to do Sodomy (he claims his falsetto deserted him many years before), he gave us a hearfelt rendition of Where Do I Go. When the tribe joined in singing the backing parts, I got chills sitting there realizing that we were all doing something that not many people who have done this show have had the chance to do: sing with someone who had sung the very same song on Broadway, on the closing night of the Broadway production, no less.

Later on, we made our way to Kiva Retreat in Santa Cruz where we all spent a few hours chilling (well, more like cooking ;-)) in the hot tubs and sauna.

The following morning, I awoke about 8:30 and found Dudley Brooks, our choreographer (who had sacked out on our couch so he didn't have to do a round-trip to San Francisco before our Sunday morning rehearsal), and Jonathon sitting downstairs talking about guitars! We finally all got up and drove to Hoover for the rehearsal.

When the tribe assembled, we got to put on a mini-show for Jonathon, running through most of the big tribe numbers that we had already completed staging. He watched and applauded! He gave us some terrific feedback on some of the numbers and we plan to incorporate as much of it as possible.

When we did I Got Life, he noticed immediately that we were not doing the raised hands at the end of the song (during "I Got Life - Life - Life - Life - Life!") as he remembered it. We had Claude and the tribe raising their hands together on each Life and he pointed out that they should alternate hands which is a much more effective visual presentation.

We explained to him that we had tried to do that, but had a problem: with Claude trying to say his line "Life!" with his hands up, he couldn't sing into the microphone (we are using handheld mics as was done in the original Broadway and tour productions).

At this moment, Jonathon made a comment that made us realize why this opportunity was so unique. He solved our problem in less than a few seconds by pointing out (something which we had never been told) that in the original productions, Woof held the mic for Claude during the song! DUH! Of course! A small trivial detail, but one which will make at least that song much better and slightly more authentic as well. And there would have been no way to guess that, we would have had to stumble on it ourselves or settle for the compromise in the choreography that we had worked out.

After a short break, and with Jonathon's departure time bearing down on us, we gathered in a circle and I asked Jonathon to talk about the nude scene, a continued source of concern for the tribe. Jonathon reiterated that the scene had always been voluntary but that he felt it was an important part of the show and the song, noting that the last line of Where Do I Go is everyone singing out loudly "Freedom!" and he always felt that the nudity in the show at that moment clearly expressed the sense of tribal freedom. We all exchanged feelings about it, and I think it definitely helped to at least explain for us how people felt when doing this scene almost 40 years ago. We also talked about the war in Iraq as compared to the war in Vietnam and we got a lot from Jonathon about his sense of that era.

As we prepared to say goodbye, the tribe surrounded him in a huge group hug and I snapped this picture! (picture will be posted soon!)

We walked back to the car and I thanked him for being so gracious to take his valuable time to spend with us. He thanked me for giving him the opportunity! What a delight to meet someone who would say that!

Fortunately, our time with Jonathon is not over. He will return to us on July 28th and participate with us in the Monterey Summer of Love Festival concert and see our show as well. It will also be an opporunity for him to meet up again with one of his friends, (Walter) Michael Harris who sang the original What A Piece Of Work Is Man on Broadway with Ronnie Dyson. Michael will also be visiting us that weekend. What will happen on stage in Monterey is ANYBODY'S GUESS!

They say that all good things must end, but I have a strong sense that this wasn't an end, but just a beginning.

Beads, Flowers, Freedom and Happiness to all!

Jon

Monterey Summer of Love, Here We Come!

As of yesterday, the Muwekma Hair Tribe of San Jose has received a confirmed invitation to perform at the Monterey Summer of Love Festival on the Monterey Fairgrounds at the site of the 1967 Monterey Pops Festival on the afternoon of Saturday, July 28th.

The festival is one of many "Summer of Love" events that are going on the Bay Area. This one has booked many historic bands to perform, including Riders of the Storm (the Doors' Ray Manzarek), Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Jefferson Starship, the Electric Flag and Moby Grape, as well as a number of local modern "tribute" bands like the Sun Kings (the Beatles), the RaveUps (the Yard Birds) and Second Flyte (the Byrds).

We will just be performing several songs from Hair (not the show). We are inviting Hair alumni to participate with us at the concert. We are being considered part of the "tribute" groups although that might change depending on who, if anyone, from the early Hair tribes agrees to join us.

This is all "way cool" for a local production of a famous show! We announced this at rehearsal last night and everyone was very excited! To paraphrase something Bill Swiggard told Barb and me in Massachusetts, "Not too many casts of Hello Dolly will ever get to do anything like this!"

Beads, flowers, freedom, happiness to all!

Jon

PS - I would like to thank Ana Escobar of the tribe for hooking us up with the promoters of the Monterey festival. THANKS ANA!!!

We Hit 100!

Still small potatoes in the global scope of things, but a nice round number to reach! This afternoon, we hit 100 total tickets sold, 87 at Theatre on San Pedro Square and 13 at Historic Hoover Theater. We are averaging $23.50 a ticket which is higher than we expected, but as the table seats sell out, this will certainly go down (overall ticket prices are between $15 and $25 for regular seats, but table seats skew things upward with a limited number of seats for each performance available in the front row for $30). However, our long-term goal of an average price of $20 a ticket seems likely to hold (or better).

Artistic License... What Does It Really Mean?

In the past few days, several people have contacted me by email about some of my blog posts and contested my view that some of the radical changes I have seen in recent HAiR productions aren't appropriate. (I wish these people would step up and comment on one of my posts, but it seems that writing publicly isn't always what people want to do).

In each of these contacts, the gist of the argument was that the reason for these changes is "artistic license", i.e., the desire/need to reinterpret the work in a different way from the original. One person also argued that the source of this feeling is that HAiR is/was essentially an improvised work and so it begs for further improvisation.

I would like to discuss each of these issues. First, the question of artistic license. The problem with using the term artistic license in this sense is that it is being used incorrectly. Artistic license is the colloquial term used to describe what an artist does to reality, i.e., to distort or ignore reality when creating a work of art. If a painter creates a horror scene out of his view of Disneyland, that is artistic license. If a playwright creates a comic farce out of events that happen in the White House, that is artistic license.

It is NOT artistic license to take the work of another artist and distort it, especially if that distortion is done without permission. That right is granted and retained expressly by the artist. If you want to do something different to reality, you are required to interpret reality on your own, i.e., writing your own musical. You aren't permitted to change (on your own) someone else's work without their authorization.

Yes, I know that "everyone does it". But that isn't really true. Indeed, most musicals that are presented in this country by amateur groups are changed somewhat, often by shortening some of a dance number, or changing a song's key, or even sometimes cutting some lines of dialogue. This is borderline modification, but in some cases it is necessary and although not strictly legal, mostly overlooked. As long as the overall show is the same, this doesn't hurt the production.

However, what if someone decided that, hey, we know that Tony is supposed to die at the end of West Side Story, but you know we want to have a happy ending, so lets just have him wrestle the gun from Chino and go off into the sunset with Maria. Would ANYONE think that a theater company would have the "artistic license" to do that? And yet, that is precisely what we saw at a recent production of Hair, in which at the end of the show, Claude was brought back to life, hugging Berger and singing Let The Sun Shine In with the rest of the tribe. How does that differ from the West Side Story scenario? Could someone explain that to me?

When a theater group produces a musical, it signs an ACTUAL license with the producing company (you might call THIS an 'artistic license' in that the author and publisher are licensing you the rights to perform the show) and that license clearly states (in every case that I have ever seen) that the work is licensed to be performed "as is" without changes or alterations. Anyone who then proceeds to change the work in some significant way and uses the term "artistic license" to justify it is not using artistic license at all but in fact is breaching the legal artistic license they are granted by the publishers. This, in our society, is called a copyright violation, and is punishable by losing your license, being sued for damages and possibly even being charged criminally (although that is extremely rare).

People often point to the reinterpretation of Shakespeare as a model for these kinds of efforts, but of course, the difference here is simple. Shakespeare's work has long been in the public domain and therefore is completely unaffected by legal licenses. Thus, it becomes a part of "reality" and can be interpreted freely by anyone who chooses to do so. Most modern musicals are still (and will for a long time be) under complete copyright protection and are therefore not permitted to be changed without the author's express permission.

On to the subject of improvisation of Hair. This is an area where I have learned a lot in the past three months. I, too, came into this process thinking that Hair had originally been an improvised musical. I now know that is almost completely the opposite from the truth. In fact, Hair had, and always had, a very very strong script, written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado over several years, then modified extensively after the original production off-Broadway. These modifications were done very quickly in the three months between the closing at the Cheetah and the opening at the Biltmore, and in fact were not completely written down into a composite final script form until after the show opened, but the script changes were always the product of the authors (yes, the tribe contributed in the process as the show was being rehearsed, as did Tom O'Horgan, and the highly non-linear staging techniques certainly had an effect on the final script, but it was still a script, just like any other show).

To think that Hair was improvised is completely misunderstanding the process. The show LOOKS improvised (that is the whole idea) but it is NOT improvised at all, and it is really important for any production/director/tribe to keep in mind that the lines are there for a reason, as are the songs. Saying that we should be able to do "our own improvisation of the show because, after all, it was originally improvised anyway" is simply a misstatement of fact.

Interestingly, Chorus Line was an example of a show that WAS almost completely improvised (or at least, created from the workshop improvisations of the original cast members' stories and lives). The story is well know that Michael Bennett took a bunch of chorus line actors and had them tell their stories in encounter groups and took those stories and worked them into a show. The script was written from the improvisation, but the improvisational technique is right there in the genesis of the production. YET NO ONE EVER REWRITES CHORUS LINE! Why isn't the argument made that "well, Chorus Line was an improvisation so we just decided to keep improvising and make a lot of changes to update the show"?

I think anyone who attempts HAiR needs to make sure they understand these two points. If you don't like the show because of the way it is written, fine, but then you shouldn't do the show. Or do as Jonathan Larson did, and write a completely NEW show based on a group of kids in Greenich Village in modern times facing different problems (after all, Rent may be a remake of La Boheme, but it also takes a lot from Hair). But, I don't think you should do HAiR "your own way". That just isn't justified.

One more point. Yes, Jim Rado has made changes to his show on many occasions. But that is his right, he is the original author (and even some people dispute this, feeling that since Gerry Ragni died, there shouldn't be any more changes to HAiR, but I will leave that one for the authors and authors' estates to work out). And if you want to make changes, you may want to contact him. You may even be able to get him to work with you on your concept (several companies have had varying degrees of success with this approach). If you do that, I would certainly agree that you are doing things correctly. But keep in mind, the vision then won't be yours, it will be his (possibly influenced by your ideas), as it rightfully should be.

Jon

I Know I'm Behind :-(

I don't know how all these bloggers do it! If you want to write about things, you have to do them, and if you are doing them (as we are now ;-) you don't have time to write about them. Arrgggh ;-)

An update will be forthcoming and another valiant try to keep updating the blog as often as possible.

We have new tribe members as of last night: Crystal Reitmeir and Leah Bailey joined the tribe and Katie Coleman joined us as vocal director. In just 1/2 an hour, she has already measurably improved on the work we have already done on Aquarius (one of the most important numbers in the show, of course, coming right at the beginning). Bringing Katie in is going to be a huge benefit for the show.

Jon

Looking back 10 weeks at Fullerton College Hair...

(Note: I posted this initially to Michael Butler's Hair Blog but decided it would be nice to replicate it on my own blog as well. It expresses my feelings about how Hair should generally be done. - Jon)

I just went back to the first review I posted on the Hair Blog concerning the Fullerton College production and I can't believe I wrote that review just over two months ago! So many of my feelings have changed about HAiR for so many different reasons. I wanted to add an updated comment both for others who might stumble on the post and also for myself, as a historical footnote. I decided to make it a fresh post because people who aren't getting RSS/Atom feeds might not go back and read it (but here is a link to the original post in case you want to :-) .)

When I went to see the Fullerton production in March, it was the first production of HAiR I had seen since 2002 when my own company, OpenStage Repertory Theater of Santa Cruz, did two one-week runs in the spring and summer. The production was initially directed by a guy named Ed Levy (who is extremely talented by the way but, in my opinion, didn't really "grok" Hair), but many things went awry and I ended up co-directing the first run and completely directing the second run. Our production was (a) amazing for the audience and (b) very strange, and often quite sucky, from an artistic perspective.

I digress for a paragraph: I think I have one relatively unusual trait as a director, and that is the ability to be supremely critical of my own work without letting it get me depressed. Critical reviews don't bother me, they encourage me to do better. When a reviewer says "such-and-such was pretty bad", others around me often say "Oh s/he doesn't know what s/he is talking about", but usually I am saying (at least to myself), "of course, that really WAS awful, wasn't it." If I do something good, I usually am aware of that, and if I do something that is mediocre (or even bad), I am just as aware of that. Of course, reality is that things are usually not black or white, but shades of grey, and most of the time, some parts of a show are good (possibly even really good) while other parts may suck rocks. Those are the times where you have to be honest enough to come to grips with the mistakes you made. That makes you better in the long run.

Ed rewrote much of the script of HAiR for our production, trying to turn it into the movie of HAiR (which was the version he had first seen growing up as a young boy in the late 70s). Having seen HAiR on stage prior to that only a few times (several college productions) along with the original Broadway and Los Angeles productions in 1969, 70 and 71, I knew that what Ed did wasn't really HAiR, but I had no awareness of what SHOULD be done to make it better. I tried to fix some things, but the damage was pretty severe and I had arrived at the party, so to speak, quite late. It was all I could do to get the show on stage satisfactorily with all the challenges we faced.

As I said, however, the audience reaction was unbelievably great. Does this mean we did a "great" show? No, it is much more testament to the fact that HAiR is such an amazing show that it is highly resilient to what anyone (director, author or actor) might do to it. You can put the tribe in 70's disco clothes, have your Crissy emulate someone from American Idol, make your Berger resemble Big Gay Al from South Park, or even shave everyone's heads, and it is still, in some form, HAiR. When you get to the end, and the audience can sing Let The Sun Shine In with the tribe, most errors are forgiven and forgotten, and all anyone in the audience will remember is "what a great show this is! The power of the music, both Galt MacDermot's stirring melodies, and Rado's and Ragni's marvelous lyrics, as well as the power of its message, transcend anything you can do to hurt the show (well not ANYTHING, but certainly a lot of things).

In the past 10 weeks, I (along with my wife Barb) have auditioned many people, chosen a cast/tribe, started directing the show, and we did extensive preparation for all of this! Boy, are we prepared! We visited the Hair Archives. We sought out members of the original Broadway tribes and other tribes to get advice about staging, performance, attitude, structure, meaning, etc. We read all (all four!) books published on Hair, bought countless videos about the era (even though I grew up in the 60s, I needed my own refresher course) and watched them, and learned, learned, learned! I think as a director, everything is about learning and preparation. If you know what you want to see on your stage and in your show, you have a better idea of how to make that happen.

So back to Fullerton. When I wrote the review 10 weeks ago, my frame of reference was limited. I had most recently seen what I consider to be my own relatively poor production of Hair in Santa Cruz (and that almost five years ago), which, despite my reservations, sold out every night and was universally loved by the audience. Did that make it a good production? No, of course not. I can be honest about that. The tribe was well-intentioned, and fairly talented, but they were given a schlocky version of the show to perform, and while the audience loved it, the show wasn't HAiR in any real sense of the word.

Since then, I have seen two much better productions (Bishop O'Dowd High School and Sacramento's Artistic Differences), along with a number of video archive productions at the HAiR Archives (which can only be watched there, no taking them home, sigh :-( ) Some were good, some better than others, some downright silly or even awful. We learned a lot about what we SHOULD do in our production and also a lot about what we SHOULDN'T do.

I mentioned some of the things I found problematical in the Fullerton College production in my initial review, including the weird "dramatic" ending with no sense of redemption. That didn't work for me at all, but I still thought it was a good production overall. I even used the word "Great" in the title of the post. I am not so sure any more.

Having seen two productions recently that I consider better, I think my initial enthusiasm for their production was more a kind of overreaction to just being able to see the material once again. It was that "Oh, this is HAIR! It MUST be GREAT!" reaction that some people tend to get when seeing shows for the first time, or the first time in a long while.

In retrospect, I still think Tom Proprofsky as Berger was terrific and I think their overall singing was very good. However, my sense of their choreography has changed dramatically. The production had a lot of highly structured dancing, done in a style similar to typical Broadway shows. I no longer feel that the choreography at Fullerton was excellent, at least in terms of HAiR (although it was very definitely a great demonstration of dance technique and the dancers were terrific in that sense). I have come to believe that truly great HAiR choreography is going to look much LESS like great organized technique and much more like improvisation (even as it isn't improvised at all). This was captured much more successfully by both Bishop O'Dowd High School and Sacramento's tribe. Learning about the things Tom O'Horgan and Julie Arenal did in 1968 to communicate with the original performers about how to do this was enlightening.

I also think that Fullerton's set was a blindspot on my part. My initial reaction was "wow", but my current reaction is "ow". The best set for HAiR will look like a hippy hangout, with junk all over the place, and no particular rhyme or reason to what is contained within. At least, that is my opinion. Fullerton's production tried to make itself as much about the set as it was about the hippies, and that just isn't supposed to be the case (at least not IMHO).

I also have noticed that almost no one wants to do "the show" anymore. Everyone needs to change it, add scenes, drop scenes, drop music, change the dialogue, etc. Completely ignoring the question of legality for the moment (the Tams-Witmark contract clearly says this is a violation of the contract unless you get written permission and that is almost never given), I raise a different question: is it wise? The authors wrote a script that stood the test of time on Broadway. I played in countless cities in the U.S.A. and across the world, and nobody ever said it was a bad show (in fact at the time it became the 6th longest running Broadway show in history). Why do we have to meddle with it so much? No one ever rewrites My Fair Lady or West Side Story (oh, unless they try to do the movie, instead of the stage production! ;-) ) or Sweeney Todd. So why the passion for rewriting the work of Ragni/Rado/MacDermot?

I don't know why people do this but I have some guesses. I think lack of understanding may be a principal cause. You can call me a traditionalist, but I think the show is terrific as it was presented. There are few minor weaknesses, but nothing that needs to be changed wholesale. If you don't understand it enough to feel that you need to rewrite it, maybe you need to learn more about it. Learn about the techniques of how it was created and first presented. Understand WHY some things weren't said, and some things were. Giving in to the desire to radically change the show, at least in my opinion, is ample evidence that you just don't "get it".

Will your production be good if you change or reinterpret the show? Maybe. Will it be HAiR? Probably not.

Namaste,

Jon Rosen

T Minus 53 Days: Getting Ready For Our Last Big Break!

The past ten days have swept by in a rush. Since my last blog entry (I know I promised to keep more up to date, but so many critical things come up every day that finding the time has been difficult - not a good excuse but the best one I have for now), we had our Kiva Retreat party which was a tremendous success, 8 more rehearsals and our first publicity photo shoot!

We also got a final commitment from Michael Butler to do several audience talkbacks during our opening weekend as well as to help participate in publicity sessions which will increase the coverage of our production. It is impossible to overestimate how this will help us. There is no doubt that celebrity has cachet among journalists (even reporters are star-struck :-) and we have already seen the effect in our initial discussions with radio and TV stations since we started telling them that Michael will be available for some interviews on local talk shows. Several weeks ago, producers of several of these shows were relatively "ho-hum" when asked whether they might want us to come on their shows to promote HAiR; now they are returning our calls!

Michael, of course, is the original producer of HAiR on Broadway and one of the five people, along with authors Gerome Ragni and James Rado and composer Galt MacDermot, and director Tom O'Horgan, who are most responsible for bringing HAiR to the world and turning it into the influential work that it ultimately became. Having Michael work with us is something truly remarkable for a small theater group like ours. He has just announced his own production of HAiR which will take place at The Met theater in Los Angeles in September and yet he is still taking valuable time from his schedule to come up to see our production in July and help us with our publicity efforts.

THANK YOU MICHAEL! YOU ARE AMAZING!

So, now, sitting here on Tuesday morning, I realize that tonight is our last rehearsal before we take a break for Memorial Day weekend, a "long" six-day stretch that is our last "down-time" before we head into the final 7 weeks of rehearsal that will culminate with opening night on July 14th. Since I started the blog almost 50 days ago, we have come so far, and yet we still have so far to go. The tribe is solidifying, but there is a lot of work to be done on all fronts. I am sure we will make it, but there are certainly bumps in the road ahead.

Now for a day-by-day update:

Friday, May 11

Barb and I, along with our daughter Ashley, went to see HAiR at Bishop O'Dowd High School. It was a fascinating experience because we didn't expect it to be very good and yet it surprised all of us. For a high school production (let alone a Catholic high school production), it was very true to the spirit of HAiR, even though it did have to make changes to accomodate using younger teenagers in the show (i.e., obviously no nude scene, and some wording changes, although not as many as one might expect; for instance, they did Sodomy intact which totally took me by surprise!) I wrote a rather long review of the show on Michael Butler's Hair blog and rather than repeat it here, I will just link to it. Have fun!

We did make contact with Bishop O'Dowd High School director Dennis Kohles after the show and he is going to provide us with a loan of many resources from his production (props, wigs, costumes). And he has graciously offered to provide us with some assistance with staging that replicates in some cases the original Broadway choreography. Thanks Dennis!

Saturday, May 12

The tribe came to our house around 6 PM and we had a marvelous dinner catered by my lovely wife, partner and producer par excellence Barbara. I grilled chicken and hamburgers and Barb made marvelous grilled veggies and tofu dogs for the non-meat eaters among us (even the meat eaters enjoyed them!) We watched three videos (Flashback to the Sixties, VH1's Behind The Music: HAiR, and In Search Of America: The Stage). The first one provided a very nice background of the sixties, and the second one was a documentary done by VH1 (someone in the tribe had recorded it off-the-air) about the making of Hair on Broadway and in the movies. The last one had Peter Jennings documenting a high school production of Hair in Boulder, Colorado, in 2001, right before and after September 11.

After the last video, we did a consciousness-raising exercise about nudity in the show, and how people felt about performing in this way. It was an amazing moment, which I can't document in detail because of confidentiality that the entire tribe agreed to, but we all opened up to each other and I think it served as the first big step in bringing the tribe even closer together. We learned that we all have fears and anxieties, even those many of us would not have expected.

Finally, we went to Kiva at midnight and had a delightful 1-1/2 hours sitting in the hot tubs and sauna, some nude, others not, but all enjoying the time together. At the end of the evening, we had our tribal naming ceremony and everyone offered something to the tribal altar. We ended the night by singing Aquarius very softly, a very moving experience.

Sunday, May 13

Rehearsal came too early for most of us after the long night! We straggled in at 10:30 (we gave everyone an extra half hour because of the previous evening's event) and Dudley started working on more movements for Donna, Aquarius and Hair. Watching how well the tribe is working together makes me feel that everything is going to be great!

By the way, we now have a Hud! Peter Griggs came to rehearsal and he is both a very good singer and actor. He has some conflicts, but he is committed to join us, so I offered him the part and he accepted!

Monday, May 14

We did an evening of music with small groups (Electric Blues, Eyes Look Your Last, Give Up All Desires, I Believe In Love) which went very well.

I particularly enjoyed working on Eyes Look Your Last which is going to be somewhat unique in this show. I took the idea from the Candlefish production in 1999. Typically, this song is sung under Claude's last reprise of Manchester England which is part of the finale. Unfortunately, both the beautiful melody and the striking words by Shakespeare (from Romeo and Juliet) are usually lost because of the duet. I am adding a sextet to sing Eyes Look Your Last over the scene between The Bed and the Finale, just before Claude sings the reprise of Ain't Got No. I found this very effective in Candlefish's production, plus it highlights this amazing song. Of course, the entire tribe will still sing Eyes Look Your Last in counterpoint to Claude in the finale as well, but now the audience will also get to hear the song by itself.

Tuesday, May 15

Christian Hadsell joined the tribe today and he looks to be both a good dancer/mover as well as a good singer. Welcome Christian!

We worked on setting the basic moves for Aquarius today. It went very well although we had some false starts trying to decide the timing of the movements in the circle of dancers around Claude.

Wednesday, May 16

We encountered a small "bump in the road" today. Last night by email, I announced the understudies for Berger (Leslie Lamcke), Woof (Dustin Velasquez) and Sheila (Ana Escobar). In the morning I received an email from an unnamed tribe member who expressed concerns that the process for naming understudies was causing dissension among the tribe. I asked the person by email to talk openly, but it was not something they wanted to do. Since the characterization had been made that the tribe felt the same way, I felt that it was important to openly discuss the situation with the entire group.

At rehearsal, I read the email to the tribe and explained why we had handled understudies as we had. I appeared that the biggest issue was that we were not naming all understudies yet, and that possibly people felt that I should only name understudies from the existing tribe who had participated in the initial audition process. I pointed out that while I had tried hard to do this, it wasn't a requirement, and in fact it was incumbent upon me as director (and the staff as a whole) to name the people who were best for the parts even if they hadn't joined the tribe yet. And in some cases, I might not choose to name an understudy at all.

This brings up one of the interesting dynamics in doing HAiR (a dynamic that has apparently existed since the show was first done on Broadway). The desire to bring the cast together as a "tribe" is an important part of doing the show. However, that can also lead to a confusion on the part of the tribe about who has what responsibilities and authority in making decisions about the show. If the director and staff of the production don't honor the implicit pact made when assembling a tribe, it can cause enough dissension to hurt the show (not a good thing). On the other hand, there simply are decisions that have to be left up to the people who are taking the production risks of producing a show.

In most shows, such an argument would never come up, because casts simply understand that the director gets to make those decisions. There is no democracy involved. HAiR alters that dynamic in subtle ways, and it is important for any director who embarks on a serious effort to mount this show to earn the trust of the tribe and to honor that as much as possible. However, it also is important to not yield all authority to the tribe, because that would make it impossible to direct the show at all.

In the end, I think we reached a very good understanding. Obviously there were a few people who wanted to at least understand what we were doing and why in more detail. I provided that explanation. However, it also seems clear that overall, people are still excited and willing to commit to this production. As long as we keep making this a unique experience, I think that will continue to be the case.

Thursday, May 17

We continued our choreographic explorations. Dudley does a terrific job in offering ideas to the tribe and they are responding. However, both of us agree that we need to start setting more things or we will quickly run out of time!

Friday, May 18

Our first break day in a while! I have to get caught up on my work, but I am also spending time with Barb making sure advertising contracts are negotiated and we continued to try to get the San Jose Pride group to offer us a spot (but it doesn't seem to be likely at this point, sigh).

At night, Barb and I go to see Thunderbabe at Theatre on San Pedro Square, Bobbi Fagone's "superheroine" musical based on her straight play of the same name. We are pleased that it is very entertaining and musically very good. I wrote a review on Artsopolis. Our ad is on the back cover of the program and although it is black and white, it is quite nice!

Saturday, May 19

We have another trio/quartet music day, this time covering White Boys, Black Boys, Air, What A Piece of Work Is Man, Dead End and Hippie Life. Great work everyone!

Right after rehearsal, Barb, Ashley and I head up the 880 towards Sacramento. We are very much looking forward to seeing Artistic Differences' production of Hair. The drive is enjoyable and the show is even more so! This is a REAL production of HAiR. It is done in a small warehouse theater, with a set that looks like a back alley in New York, junk lying all over the stage. But what is most fun is the tribe! They are really hippies (or at least excellent actors portraying hippies!) I wrote a post on Michael Butler's blog describing the entire show. Enjoy!

There are a lot of things to like in this production. It has heart, really good singers, a true Hair spirit, and some wonderful small touches. There are a few weaknesses. Dudley and I have always agreed that the choreography in the show needs to LOOK like it is totally spontaneous, although, of course, that is completely impossible, it has to be choreographed to a large extent. The Nimiipuu tribe gets it right most of the time, but there are moments when everyone's arms go up in exactly the same way, or the foot movements are strict and obviously "set". We know we need to try to avoid this. This is still a very small fault in a very good production.

Their nude scene is excellent. It does the job simply and effectively. I didn't like the addition of an expository scene between Claude and Sheila right before the finale. I thought it "took us out of the musical" for a few minutes, and weakened the ending somewhat. However, it was so good overall, that even this didn't hurt it much.

We talked to some of the actors to see if they were interested in joining our tribe. We might get one or two, but most seem interested in auditioning for the Los Angeles production and the timing is such that they probably can't do both. Sigh...

Sunday, May 20

We have an early dance rehearsal and we work on Walking In Space. Dudley has some terrific ideas involving walking on the backs of actors positioned on the floor on their hands and knees, but I am not sure they will work. One problem is that we will be using handheld mics and it looks like the logistics of balancing and safety while walking across the backs of other performers may make it impossible to use the mics properly. We may need to rethink this.

He also works on "floating, flipping" and that looks very nice. It is always exciting to see people lifted into the air and this song so calls for that.

After the rehearsal, one of my fellow workers at Coral8, Paul Neyman, comes to take publicity photos. Paul is a real photog with professional quality digital equipment and he jumps right in. Barb has arranged an assortment of costumes for the tribe to try, and we get contributions from the tribe members themselves. We are on the lawn in the sun in front of the Hoover and it is very exciting! This is the first time we have put the people in colorful hippie clothes and they look GREAT!

Summary

Well, that is almost up to date. I will fill in Monday and the rest of the this week soon. Fortunately, we have the big break coming up, and then it is mad dash for the finish line! See you all soon.

Peace,

Jon

T Minus 63 Days: Kiva Time!

Our second week of rehearsals is over and we are now just nine weeks from opening night. Tonight is a big event for the Muwekma tribe. We are meeting at my house for a tribal dinner and videos, which will be followed at midnight by a trek to Kiva Retreat in Santa Cruz for a private "after-hours" party.

Kiva is a fascinating place. It is the only day spa in the area that is communal in nature and provides a clothing-optional environment with hot tubs, a magnificent sauna and a beautiful lawn and garden. They also provide therapeutic massage therapists for hire during normal hours. After closing (midnight on weekends, 11 PM on weekdays), they offer private rental of the entire facility for after-hours parties.

Kiva is totally spiritual (they aggressively enforce the non-sexual nature of their facility) and is a perfect environment to immerse a HAIR tribe into the experience of group nudity. Since it is clothing-optional, it is perfectly acceptable for people to wear bathing suits, robes, or whatever makes them feel comfortable, but my experience is that most people will usually disrobe after spending even a short time around others who are nude. Most people seem to be more uncomfortable remaining clothed in the presence of people who are relaxing in the nude, than to get naked. Once the normal taboo of seeing others in the nude around you is broken, it becomes a much less threatening thing to experience yourself.

We have a delightful evening planned. During and after dinner, we will be watching several very interesting videos we have accumulated about HAIR and the 60’s including:

• Peter Jennings’ In Search Of America - the making of a HAIR production at a Boulder, Colorado high school in 2001 (right before and after September 11)


• Berkeley in the Sixties - a documentary on radicalism in Berkeley, California


• Flashing on the Sixties: A Tribal Document - a documentary on hippies

Barb has planned dinner for the grill along with vegetarian entrees to accommodate all of our tribes’ eating habits.

At Kiva, we will all get acquainted with each other (hopefully most in the nude) and at the end of the evening, we will perform our tribal naming ceremony. We are going to have an altar and each tribe member is responsible for making an offering (a small object, either serious, humorous, or otherwise) in honor of the tribe. The altar will travel with us for rehearsals and performances.

Rehearsals are coming along well. Our last rehearsal of the week on Wednesday started with an exercise that we have taken from Tom O’Horgan’s playbook, an exercise is sensory overload. I will not describe it in detail here, because we will still be using it on members of the tribe who haven’t experienced it yet, but it definitely caused a variety of reactions from different members of the tribe. We then proceeded to a complete music review and concluded by learning Sodomy and Donna. In four music rehearsals, we have now gone through the following songs in the show:

• Aquarius
• Donna
• Hashish
• Sodomy
• Ain't Got No Grass
• Initials
• Hair
• Walking in Space
• Our Eyes Are Open (Walking in Space Reprise)
• The Bed

There is lots more to do, but plenty of time to do it, so this makes me feel really good. Add to that the developments in marketing (see my previous post about performing at the San Francisco Pride Celebration) and we are definitely heading in the right direction!

Peace to all!

Jon

We Will Perform at the San Francisco Gay Pride Celebration!

The Muwekma Hair Tribe of San Jose has just accepted an invitation to perform on Saturday, June 23rd, on the Main Stage of the San Francisco’s 37th Pride Celebration! We will be performing several selections from HAIR in concert and we will be sharing the Main Stage with a number of other professional performing arts groups including the San Francisco Opera. This is very exciting for all of us, in providing exposure for our upcoming show, as well as permitting us to spread the message of HAIR to a wider audience during this very important year!

Kudos to Sammy Rodriguez (Berger) for making the connection to get this set up! Thanks Sammy!!!

Namaste,

Jon

T Minus 67 Days: We Are Muwekma!

Last night, at our first dance rehearsal, the tribe finally voted on a name, and I am proud to say that we are now officially the Muwekma Hair Tribe of San Jose. Muwekma is the name that the nation of Native Americans who live in the San Francisco Bay area use to refer to themselves.

It is interesting to note that the original San Francisco Hair tribe in 1970 which performed at the Orpheum Theater was the Ohlone tribe. That is the name used by most Americans to refer to the Native Americas of the Bay area, but it is actually the name of their principal language and indeed encompasses groups of Native Americans as far away as San Juan Batista and Big Sur. In the Ohlone language, Muwekma means "Our People".

The tribe considered a lot of names including Costanoan which is the third name used to refer to the Muwekma people. Costanoan was the name given by the Spanish missionaries to the Native Americans of this area. Another name we considered was Costenos (the Native American derivation of the Spanish-given name Costanoan).

We also considered names of some of the regional tribes in the area (all part of the Muwekma) including Solchequis (the name of a local tribe that was located near the Santa Clara Mission), Chochenyo (an East Bay tribe), Ramaytush (San Francisco to San Mateo tribe), Tamyen or Tamien (a tribe in the area of Coyote Creek near San Jose), Awaswas (Santa Cruz) and others.

During our discussion, tribe member Esther Selk pointed out that while there are many local tribe names, our tribe consists of members from all over the Bay area and she thought that Muwekma was the most appropriate name. Most of the rest of the tribe agreed.

An interesting sidenote is that the Muwekma tribe is currently attempting to secure recognition from the Federal government of their status as a surviving Native American tribe. Their status was stripped from them in the early 20th century by bureaucrats in Sacramento at the Bureau of Indian Affairs who were trying to reduce the number of different tribes they had to deal with. You can learn more about the Muwekma and their efforts to be recognized at their website.

Rehearsal progress update:

May 7

We had another great music rehearsal, covering the title song Hair and Walking In Space. We also went back and reviewed most of the previous songs we had learned. Great progress on the music front and the tribe sounds awesome!

May 8
Choreographer extraordinaire Dudley Brooks took the helm last night and started with a variety of physical exercises intended to prepare the tribe for some of the things he will be asking of them during the music numbers. Some of the exercises included supporting each other's weight, moving while on top of someone else's back, then having the person underneath move also. He also initiated jumping exercises which then transitioned into full body lifts and pyramids. He also did some free-form dance involving upper body movement (head, shoulder and hair, an essential element of this show!), and also did something called the waterfall in which people moved over others and it looked just like, well, a waterfall! We will process some video that we took of the exercises and put it up on the blog soon.

We are still looking for a few more tribe members, including a Hud, but it looks like we may have some progress on all fronts. Hopefully, we will announce the rest of the tribe by early next week.

Until next time, namaste!

T Minus 70 Days: Where Does The Time Go?

Arrghhh, I am falling down on the job! Its been almost 8 days since I last recorded a blog entry and so much has happened! I am going to try to make sure I post three times a week from now on, the daily goal may be unachievable for me and better to set a realistic goal and hit it (or at least close).

Here we are on May 6th, and the first week of rehearsals just flew past! A daily recap:

April 29

Casting decisions were finally announced and posted. I contacted all people with principal roles and we posted the rest. I wished I could have called everyone but it takes a lot of time especially when people don't always answer. Fortunately, we had already sent out email to the entire tribe that was cast so everyone knew they were selected for the show.

As of the moment of casting, we were still looking for a Hud and possibly one more black male actor, but all other roles were filled.

April 30

A few bumps in the road. Several people who were cast dropped out (I won't mention specific names here). One of the women who I had cast in a principal role called me to tell me that she had been offered a lead role in a major musical in San Francisco (Equity contract!) Arrghhh! I told her it was okay, I fully understood, and I probably would do the same thing. One of the costs of delaying our callbacks was just this kind of risk. It is hard to ask people to wait and they have to keep auditioning (after all, they don't know if they will get cast in our show until we tell them!) She goes with my blessings, although I have a nagging suspicion even she isn't totally sure she will enjoy this other job better than she would have enjoyed HAiR! The other person is someone I think may have really wanted a principal role and when it didn't happen, decided that they weren't interested in the ensemble. Sigh... This show is ALL ABOUT the tribe, but I understand.

May 1

First rehearsal! We gathered at Historic Hoover and everyone was accounted for except for Cy (who was excused because of a conflict) and one other women who I think is probably a drop-out also (although this still hasn't been confirmed by an email or phone call, but she hasn't shown up to any rehearsals so I expect that's it ;-) So we are now missing 4 people: Hud, one black female and two more actors of no particular ethnicity. We will start the hunt immediately!

Our first rehearsal went great. We spent a half-hour talking about some administrative stuff, Barb took some costume measurements and then we plunged into the read-through. Everyone read their lines and I played the tracks from the original Broadway cast album (and a few from other albums where the OBC didn't have the music, such as Dead End and the Ain't Got No reprise in Act II). A lot of the tribe sang along with the album which was very cool to watch. Obviously a lot of people already know some of the music!

One thing I noticed which was very good was the number of people in the tribe who hung around at the end of rehearsal. Sometimes everybody just packs up and leaves. While this isn't always true, it is often an indication that there is no real affection for the show or the rest of the cast. When people don't want it to end, that is a really good sign!

May 2

Our first music rehearsal. We did some more administrative work, and Barb took some more measurements. We bring in the keyboard and decide to tackle Aquarius first.

BUZZER!

Aquarius is one of the songs in Hair with the most difficult harmonies for the tribe (there are some other songs with tough harmonies too, but they tend to be smaller groups which are easier to manage). My naivete in not being totally prepared for this was obvious. For one thing, the harmonies in Aquarius aren't always written as to make it clear who should sing what, and so I fell back on asking people where they felt most comfortable singing (a great vocal director would have had each person in the tribe already picked out for their part). Lesson learned: I will make sure before other rehearsals to have this worked out in advance. Fortunately, most of the other tribal numbers don't have this complication ;-)

We stumble through the first 16 bars of the group singing (after the initial solo measures) and it takes us a while to figure out the harmonies. Fortunately, everyone recognizes my tentativeness and jumps in to help. In particular, Dennis Beasley (our Woof who also has experience as a chorus director) gives me some good advice and we finally get a few of the trickier part assignments worked out. We move forward through another dozen measures and then go back to review. WOW! Its been less than an hour, and despite my own errors in preparation, the tribe sounds like, well, a TRIBE!

Another half-an-hour and the song is sounding very very good (especially for a first rehearsal with me as vocal director). We move from the keyboard to the Hairaoke CD that we have and run through the song with full accompaniment and it sounds amazing! This is going to really be good!

I decide that for the second number of the night, we will try something easier. Hashish ;-) No harmonies at all, just slow, rhythmic pulsed singing (almost moaning :-) This one goes much much easier and in about 30 minutes, we have it done. We run through it a few times and then go back to Aquarius. Only a few minor glitches.

I am very very pleased with this first music rehearsal, despite the false start.

Again, everyone hangs around a while talking about the show. There is obvious concern for filling the role of Hud, although I am less concerned. I would, of course, love to have Hud here from the beginning, but we still have plenty of time, 10 weeks to be exact, which is much longer than most shows have from the beginning.

May 3/4

These days are a blur. Lots of stuff to do at work, and a lot of sleep to catch up on. We (Barb and I) have been going almost non-stop since we left for New York, with callbacks starting as soon as we got back, and then rehearsals almost immediately after the decision-making process was done. We had planned to see a show on Friday evening, but I was so tired, we just went straight to bed.

May 5

Our second music rehearsal is another success! We start with some non-singing exercises just to get everyone "in the mood" and then move on to vocal warm-ups. Thanks to Dennis for jumping in and helping here again! I decide to try one of the songs that is difficult to learn not because of harmonies (it has almost none) but because (a) it is a patter song to rival Gilbert and Sullivan and (b) most people haven't ever heard it.

The song is The Bed and I start out by explaining what I consider to be the significance of The Bed. Most directors cut The Bed. I think they don't understand it. First of all, The Bed is a very important number to show once more Claude's gradual separation from the tribe before he ultimately submits to the Army. It comes after The Trip and Good Morning Starshine, and sets up the Aquarius Goodnights where the tribe leaves Claude just before he transitions to being a soldier.

Even more important is that this is a classic "show" number and removing it actually is one of the reasons people wrongly think Hair "isn't a true musical". In fact, Hair is very much a musical and in many ways, follows quite traditional form ans structure. Of course, a completely different style of staging and music is superimposed on top of that, but to say it has no structure is simply wrong.

Consider that The Bed, which is a playful, funny song, is precisely at the same point in the show (near the end) where many other dramatic musicals have a similar comedic song. The immediate example that comes to mind is West Side Story (the theatrical musical, not the movie, which screwed it up by switching songs around ;-) In the stage version of West Side Story, right after the rumble and just before the scenes where Anita is raped in the drugstore and Tony is killed, there is a pressure relief number, Officer Krupke. This also happens in other musicals. There is a real need to lighten the spirit after the set-up and before the final climax, or the audience has no real chance to recover. And it also makes the final climax even more clear. (By the way, in true musical comedy, this is often switched, with a more serious number coming at this same point, sandwiching two comic moments, usually a set-up and then the final comic climax).

In any case, we started to work on The Bed and it went very well indeed. Fortunately the music itself is simple with only a few notes of simple chord harmony almost precisely where you would expect it. The middle of the song is a very difficult patter with weird rhythms. But the tribe got it (in fact, I tried to simplify it for them and they resisted, wanting to do it they way it was written!)

The Bed is a fun song and I think everyone had a good time learning it.

Just before we moved on, we had a brief moment of fun ;-) My cell phone rang and I had no idea who it was (private number). I decided to answer it, and it was a good thing because it was Michael Butler! He had called to talk to me about our upcoming press release. I told him I was in the middle of rehearsal. The whole tribe yelled "Hi Michael!" and he laughed on the other end of the phone. (Barb later told me I should have had them sing The Bed for him! Damn, I just don't think fast enough on my feet sometimes!) Fortunately, we agreed to talk on Sunday and he urged me to get back to the rehearsal.

Next we did Initials. This one is a simple song, with only three notes of harmony at the end. The melody is simple and the range is limited so we had no difficulty learning it. We worked a bit on the staccato "initials" and it sounded very good for a first effort.

We moved on to the reprise of Walking In Space (Our Eyes Are Open Wide) and finished it quickly. It is really fulfilling to listen to the amazing music that MacDermot, Ragni and Rado put together being developed by live singers all over again. This song is always one of my favorites and the tribe is doing it tremendous credit.

Finally, we tackled Ain't Got No Grass. Another patter song, this one has the tricky middle section ("A bombs/ H bombs/ P bombs/ Q bombs/ Chinese/ Czechs/ Hindus/ Bindus/ Italianos/ Polacks/ Germans/ Youse/ Jews/ Ups and Downs" and more!) that moves like a runaway train. With no threat of harmony to intrude ;-) this one became mostly an exercise in learning the rhythms correctly and working through the tricky syllables. I emphasized to everyone the need to "not be a hero" and to take a breath somewhere in the middle as long as everyone doesn't do it at the same time!

Our time was almost up and we reviewed all the numbers pretty successfully, and went back and did Aquarius, too. Fortunately, not too much had been lost since Wednesday!

I got home Saturday late afternoon pretty tired, but we had opera tickets and I am glad we went. Opera San Jose did a magnificent production of Madame Butterfly. I'm glad we got to see it.

Sunday was a work-at-home day for me (although I ended up in the office for a while because I had some things to pick up). I finally talked to Michael about our press release which will be going out this week and he gave me a few comments which I incorporated. We are working on plans to have Michael conduct some press interviews on our behalf and also to do several audience talkbacks during the production run.

Oh, and I think I may not have mentioned this yet, but we finalized our plans with Jonathon Johnson to come talk with the tribe in June and also do several audience talkbacks in July during the second week of the run! Jonathon is a terrific man who wrote the recent book Good Hair Days about his journeys through several productions of Hair. He played Claude on Broadway during the final months of the production including the last performance. We are very excited to have him work with us!

We are heading into Week 2 of rehearsals and our first dance rehearsals. Things are moving along well and I am very excited. See you next time!

Let The Sun Shine In!

T Minus 78 Days: Decisions, decisions!

We finished three days of callbacks on Wednesday, and I haven't blogged since the beginning of the week because I have been caught up in the process of trying to figure out how to best use the people who have come out to be in the show. It is difficult to write about this while the process is ongoing, because there are issues that arise in callbacks which effect each individual actor in different ways, and it is almost impossible to talk about how the director views these situations without publicly "undressing" each of the people who are hoping to get into this tribe, and that is something I am very reluctant to do.

However, I do want to document this process and so I am going to take a somewhat obtuse approach. I am going to write about the issues that we are struggling with as anonymously as possible, without naming any names or even revealing too many details about the parts under consideration. I expect those of you who are involved in the process, if you are reading the blog, will try to identify individuals, including yourselves, from these comments. I hope that you don't because I promise you that you are just as likely to draw incorrect conclusions as correct ones.

The biggest initial dilemma we faced for callbacks is how to view the over-all tribe casting vs. potential audience expectations with respect to age and appearance. This is a very important issue for a director. We have a number of very talented actors who tried out who might not normally fit someone else's definition of "young hippie" but who showed such passion for the show, as well as their talent, that we are very reluctant to let them go.

A mentor of mine once gave me a good piece of advice. We were considering casting a boy in the role of Peter Pan, which as you probably know is traditionally played by a woman (such as Mary Martin). He said,

It is always a director's option to defy audience expectations when casting a show. However, if you do that, you had better be damned sure you are right!

An audience will accept an average performance from someone who meets their expectations, but if someone who is so unexpected based on their experience appears, that person has some serious hurdles to overcome.

Advice for actors: Please try to keep this in mind the next time you aren't cast in a part you want and you believe that the director is "prejudiced" about your age, look, height, weight, whatever. It may not be the director's personal prejudice that is involved at all, but only his/her understanding of what the audience's expectation will be, and an unwillingness to take that risk (and thus put the show itself at some level of risk).

In light of the good people who came to auditions, the question immediately came up: do we consider casting some of these people in the tribe despite the fact that they are obviously not in their early 20s? We don't have the benefit of a large "gulf" between the audience and the stage, either, as might be the case in a big theater. At Theatre on San Pedro Square, in particular, the tribe will pretty much be in the audience's lap.

Barb and Dudley and I struggled with this question for several days during auditions and callbacks. We decided to call back people based purely on talent, not on age or appearance, because we wanted to give ourselves the option of making that decision later. Now that we are done with callbacks, the question remains, will this work or not?

Barb and I discussed this at great length and we kept coming back to some of the productions of HAiR that we have seen. One of the most sincere productions of HAiR we ever saw was a small production in an open-air theater which included a cast of a variety of ages, shapes and even talent levels. However, the entire tribe had so bonded and was so committed to doing the show well that it worked and completely defied any expectations one might have had. On the other hand, a recent commercially-staged production in Los Angeles, with probably a million-dollar-plus budget and Equity talent, was, in our opinion, almost totally without any real meaning. It certainly didn't work for us and that seems to be the consensus in the HAiR community. We would much rather have a show like the former than one like the latter.

We started to identify the people who are clearly committed to this production. They tried to come to all of the callbacks unless there was no choice because of outside commitments, they have worked hard to study the materials in advance and prepare themselves and they did anything we asked them to do without objections.

After continued back-and-forth about this, the decision finally became clear for us. We might not have a tribe that is the ideal age or size or shape, but we will have a tribe with great talent, and a passion to do this show the way it should be done. We will trust to the magic of theater to overcome any audience expectations. What really matters is delivering the message of HAiR with heart and soul and we just don't see why that mandates that only a group of 20-year-olds be involved.

We made our final decisions on Thursday night and invited the selected tribe members to participate on Friday. However, we still postponed principal role casting because we had some concerns in that area as well.

We considered doing a supplemental callback but after trying to arrange it for the appropriate people, we had problems making it work. Maybe that was a message from the stars telling us that we should go with our instincts and stop trying to use too much logic.

We ultimately decided to use the same philosophy for casting the principals as we have for the overall tribe and we will cast our fates to the wind. Making the right choices based on talent and heart and desire should trump any specific "look" we thought we might have wanted.

I probably should have known this is the way it would end up because I have been burned by making mistakes before. Once, when directing The Fantasticks, I cast a man in a role that he really didn't want (he was hoping to get El Gallo) because he "looked" the part and was a slightly better actor, rather than casting another man, whose look concerned me despite being only marginally less talented and much more passionate about the part. Although the chosen actor ultimately did well, it clearly was not the best performance he had ever given (his heart simply wasn't in it), and he also made the directing job extremely difficult. I expect that had I chosen the other actor, despite his look being somewhat unusual and his somewhat lesser ability (but not by much), he would have given me the performance of his life and it would have shown in the final production.

In this case, the decisions are even clearer. And so, we reached the end of the first part of the journey. Casting decisions have been announced and we are ready to start rehearsals on Tuesday...

Look out San Jose, here we come!

T Minus 81 Days: The Long or The Short Journey?

It is now the morning after the second night of callbacks, and I have been lying awake pondering the 11+ week stretch ahead of us before opening night. By typical musical theater rehearsal standards, that is a VERY long time! It got me thinking about discussions I have had recently with several other directors of HAiR who are taking different approaches, some by choice, some by necessity.

For instance, Richard Parison, director of an upcoming production at the Prince Music Theatre in Philadelphia (http://www.princemusictheater.org/home), starts his rehearsals the same week as we do, but his production opens on May 26th while ours won’t open until July 14th. Why the vast difference?

PMT is an Equity regional theater, meaning that most of their performers (although not necessarily all) will be members of Actors’ Equity, the union of stage actors. For these actors, doing HAiR will be a full-time job for the next two months (one month of rehearsal and one month of performances). They will work 40+ hours a week during the rehearsal period and they will do 8 performances a week right from the beginning.

By comparison, Stagelight Productions is a non-Equity “semi-professional” theater. While we will be paying our performers a modest stipend based on ticket sales, none of our actors can make a living doing our production (with the price of gas over $3.25 a gallon in the Bay area right now, some will be lucky to cover their travel expenses with their stipend). Most of them will have full-time jobs during the day and all of our week-day rehearsals will be at night (week-end rehearsals will be during the day). Because of this, we simply can’t rehearse as long every week as a full-fledged professional theater can. Our rehearsal schedule will vary from 12 to 15 hours a week, but will cover almost 3 times as many weeks, resulting in roughly the same number of rehearsal hours by the time we are ready to open.

For most traditional musicals, intense rehearsal periods like PMT’s are ideal. Learning the music, choreography and blocking is a challenge that requires constant repetition, and the concentrated effort that can be achieved in a short rehearsal period often bears the best fruit. When rehearsals are stretched over a long period of elapsed time, things learned early are often forgotten before you come back to them in later rehearsals. This results in frequent relearning that is unnecessary when the rehearsals occur in a limited timeframe.

However, that isn’t always the best approach. To consider a different example, most original Broadway productions have very long rehearsal periods (including extensive out-of-town tryouts or in-town previews), because new shows require constant changes and tuning as the directors and performers learn what works and what doesn’t. Short rehearsal periods for new musicals often result in failure, because the “gestation” time simply isn’t long enough to create the ideal show (not that long gestation always results in success, of course ;-)

But what of HAiR? It certainly isn’t a new production (it is almost 40 years old this year!) There have been many productions of HAiR over the years, both professional and non-professional, and the script is reasonably well-tested. Shouldn’t the process be relatively straight-forward?

I don’t think so. In fact, while I certainly understand the need for PMT to keep their rehearsal period compact (the cost of even low Equity salaries over a long rehearsal period would be almost impossible to recoup in the typical 4-6 week regional theater run), HAiR has another aspect that is hard to measure but is very important.

HAiR is described as “The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” and at the heart of that slogan is the word “tribe”. Some may feel this is silly or pretentious, but if you take it seriously (as I do), it is one of the important aspects of a good production of HAiR. It is essential to create that tribal experience within the group of performers and staff who work on the show in order to convey it successfully to the audience.

Building a tribe, whether in the theater or in the real world, is not an instantaneous experience. Many concepts associated with “tribe”, such as “tribal customs” and “tribal rituals”, connote long-developing experiences that can’t happen easily overnight. While the physical process of learning and rehearsing a show may be accomplished in a concentrated period of time, I question whether the tribe-building requirements of HAiR can be satisfied that way.

I have had the opportunity to see many productions of HAiR since seeing it on Broadway in 1968 and in Los Angeles in 1970. The best productions are accomplished by groups which already have “tribal” experience (such as local repertory theaters with a long-standing tightly-knit group of performers), or which have taken the time during their rehearsal process to build some of that experience. The worst productions (and believe me, there have been a few!) are typically those which consider HAiR “just a show” and obviously rehearse it in that manner.

While we are certainly taking the “long journey” approach to creating our production of HAiR out of necessity, I don’t think I would do it any other way, even if that was possible. I think we have a better opportunity to build some of the necessary tribal experiences with our cast precisely because we will be spreading the rehearsals over a longer period of linear time. Indeed, it will be a slower process, and there will probably be some trouble spots as a result. Over-rehearsal is always a worry, because in every show, there comes a point when the performers simply need an audience, and a long rehearsal period delays that moment, sometimes too long. However, the benefit of letting the tribal experience percolate until it really resonates within each member of the tribe can’t be overestimated.

I expect that financial practicality makes it very difficult for a company like PMT to do that. I am sure that Richard will try very hard to build a good tribe at PMT in the short time he has available and I certainly hope he succeeds. However, I am very glad we are taking the longer journey, because I think any production of HAiR benefits from the time spent building camaraderie within the tribe, which is an essential ingredient for it to ring true.

T Minus 83 Days: The Ups and Downs of Old Broadway

We got back to the Radisson in New Jersey pretty late (we took a detour without the proper directions at the Throgs Neck Bridge in New York City and ended up spending an extra hour on the road lost in Queens and Brooklyn while coming back from Hatfield, sigh!) We had decided that we would spend Saturday in the city going to a museum and seeing one more Broadway show. Shortening our New York trip by one day meant missing an evening with my brother and his family and also one less day in New York to explore, but we felt the extra day at the Archives had been well worth it.

Saturday was beautiful. Unlike the previous week, the temperature was balmy, and the sun was out. We drove in to Manhattan, parked, and took a cab ride (Barb’s first in Manhattan) to the American Museum of Natural History. I hadn’t been there in many years and it was as exciting to me as it was to Barb. Many of the exhibits have been renovated since the last time I recall being there (over 10 years). We started out with the Hayden Planetarium’s Cosmic Collisions presentation. We walked through an exhibit which demonstrated the scale of the universe from 10 to the 26 power down to 10 to the -26th power (the size of the universe down to the size of a quark). All of this was very sobering to put our lives into a cosmic reference.

Then we went through the main attraction at the AMNH, the dinosaur exhibits. AMNH still has the largest displayed collection of dinorsaur fossils in America and it is awe-inspiring. Standing beside a complete skeleton of a T-Rex or an Allosaurus is hard to describe. Yes, we have all seen it in Jurassic Park and in photos, but standing beside the actual fossils is a completely different experience.

We had a light lunch and then finished our explorations by going through an exhibit which illustrated all of the known species of plant and animal life on earth. Another thought-provoking experience.

We decided to walk from the Museum to Columbus Circle to shop there. We bought some stuff to take home there and then headed to Times Square to have dinner and get tickets for our final Broadway show of the trip. We had a delightful dinner at Le Pigalle (we sat next to a couple of young ladies, one of whom told us she lives in Chicago but works in San Jose two days a week as a consultant and she is now looking forward to seeing HAiR in July or August!) and headed over to TKTS. Once again, Avenue Q was gone, so we decided to see the last Kander and Ebb musical that will ever appear on Broadway, Curtains. And boy, do we wish we had chosen differently ;-(

It was a sad experience to see this show. First, I had a real gripe with TKTS. When we saw the Drowsy Chaperone, we were offered orchestra tickets which normally sell for $110 for $55 each. This is the classic “50%” discount that I remember from TKTS a long time ago. When we asked about tickets for Curtains, they only had mezzanine tickets, which normally sell for $70. So I assumed we would pay $35. However, when they asked for payment in cash, they wanted $115 which is only about 25% off. I questioned them and they said it was 50% off the top ticket price regardless of the ticket you get. So someone getting orchestra seats really gets the 50% discount, but someone who can only get mezzanine seats is getting a much lower discount. I complained a bit, but I realized Barb was frustrated with my behavior (and rightly so), so I went ahead and purchased the tickets, despite feeling a bit ripped off (if I had known what we were about to see, I would have been MUCH more upset!)

We barely got to the theater and nestled ourselves into the 16th row in the mezzanine (definitely “nose-bleed country”). There was, of course, no legroom. However all of these inconveniences were going to pale by in comparison to the show that was just about to start.

I will cut to the chase. I have seen over 50 shows on Broadway in my life, including such clunkers as Carrie and Superman, and without any doubt, this show was the worst I have ever seen on Broadway. It resembled a bad community theater production, and wasted the normally incredible talents of such actors as Karen Ziemba, Debra Monk and David Hyde Pierce. In some ways like Drowsy Chaperone (noted in an earlier blog post during our first week in New York as excellent), it is a musical within a musical, this time a kind of “Columbo meets Crazy For You”, but really really bad.

What is saddest about this is that Kander and Ebb are one of my favorite Broadway composing/writing teams. Of course, everyone loves Cabaret and Chicago, but they have done other incredible shows like Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Woman of the Year, Zorba, and my favorite Kander/Ebb flop (not, in my opinion, because the show was bad, but because of awful timing coming out at the end of the "sung-through" musical period), Steel Pier. Every one of these shows, even the ones with the least commercial appeal, were at least reasonable attempts at good theater and good Broadway music. This one fails on all points.

It is cheesy, relying on cheap jokes, bad puns, wheezy “western” choreography. They took one of the best songs in the show, A Tough Act To Follow, which is a classic Kander/Ebb gentle ballad and hopped it up into an awful imitation Busby Berkeley number, complete with lighted stairs, blowing fog and a kick-line.

And then, to add insult to injury, the audience gave the show a standing ovation, doing what audiences normally seem to do these days, especially on Saturday nights. I guess if you pay $110 for a ticket (or even $55!) you have to convince yourself that you didn’t waste the money. Well, sorry folks, this time you did.

I expect Fred Ebb is turning over in his grave every night the curtain goes up on this monstrosity. It is clear this was done for the money, and like Vera says in “Chicago”, “Sorry, suckers!” It is a shame that the Kander/Ebb legacy, which was, for the most part, almost universally brilliant, has to end on this tarnished note.

We drove back to New Jersey wishing that somehow we could have ended this incredible trip on a better note. Barb tried to laugh it off… “Well, we batted .500 this trip!” And indeed, it doesn’t do anything to dampen our enthusiasm for our upcoming production of HAiR, or diminish the wonderful accomplishments and discoveries we had at the Archives. We just wish it could have been better. Sigh.

T Minus 84 Days: The Archives At Last!

(A note to the reader: Because I have had to spend time double-checking facts and other things, the final posts from the trip to New York are out of sequence. I am posting them initially in the order I release them, so you will see them as they appear. Later on, I will reorganize them so that they appear in time sequence. - Jon)

Wednesday in Hatfield, Massachusetts, started delightfully. The Old Mill On The Falls Bed and Breakfast is a wonderfully restored old grist mill that sits right on a waterfall which used to power the grinding wheels. Proprietor Ted Jarrett served us a fantastic breakfast (the first really good breakfast we’d had since we left home) of fresh fruit and homemade waffles.

We called Nina Dayton and asked her when we should come over and she said “Now!” So we got into the car, drove the short distance (it turns out we could have walked it, but it was still very cold and we had our laptop, scripts and other stuff to carry, so in the end, we were glad we drove) and in less than 5 minutes, we were pulling into Nina’s driveway.

We had already met Nina, her husband Trevor and their daughter Annie at the HAiR dinner party in New York City on Saturday, but we really didn’t have a chance to spend much time with them. That was about to be corrected! In the end, we got to spend three very full days with some of the warmest, most gracious people we could have imagined we would ever meet. They welcomed us into their global family, as well as their own smaller local family with open arms.

A bit of history: Nina was just 14 when she started working at the Biltmore Theater where HAiR was playing in New York. She had been hanging out at the theater to see the show and meet the tribe, and her friend was working at the concession counter. When an opening came up, she was asked if she wanted a job, and she signed up. She remained in that position (while still going to school during the day) until the very last performance of the show on July 1, 1972.

Nina got the amazing opportunity to perform on stage with the Broadway tribe for the final performance of HAiR, which was already expanded by the participation of many of the alumni from the previous four years of Broadway performances. About a year later, she was given permission to produce and direct a very special HAiR production utilizing half professional actors and half inner city youth in New York.

Today she is the curator and director of the official Hair Archives, and runs both the physical archives and the Archives web site, as well as some portions of Michael Butler's web sites, and his blogs. She consults on many Hair related projects and current productions of Hair.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday became a complete immersal in the culture of HAiR. We reviewed many articles and reviews written about the show, numerous script variations that have occurred going back to the original Broadway script, the revival script and the now licensed 1995 Tams-Witmark script. We looked at many photographs including the few available photos of the original set on Broadway. Costumes fared better than the sets in pictures. The set of a show is almost always in the background and most promotional photos which focus on the performers don’t show it very well, whereas the costumes are on the people who are typically photographed up close and personal ;-). Barb had a field day in learning about the styles of the original Broadway costumes.

Although there is no known video or film of an actual original first-run HAiR performance, we did get to look at a number of videos of those early tribes, from highlight clips of various Broadway and Los Angeles casts performing on the Johnny Carson, David Frost, David Steinberg, Ed Sullivan and the Smothers Brothers shows. One clip in particular demonstrated the unbelievable performing genius that was Ragni's Berger. During the Johnny Carson show, he gets up on Carson's desk while singing HAiR and throws Carson totally off his game, something that almost never happened to Johnny on the air.

We looked at a taping of the 1988 United Nations concert which covered almost all of the songs from the original production with authors Jerome Ragni and James Rado, composer Galt MacDermot, many stars who had been in original first-run productions of HAiR (Melba Moore, Donna Summer, Heather MacRae, Paul Jabara, Nell Carter, Andre DeShields, and more), Treat Williams who played Berger in the movie, as well as a number of star performers who just came out to help in the benefit performance (Bea Arthur, Rex Smith, Frank Stallone, Chuck Mangione, Dr. Ruth Westheimer and others).

We also got to view several videos of more recent productions. Some of these productions were very good, including excellent representations of the original staging and choreography. Some, as would be expected, were not as good as others, and we also observed a number of specific things that we felt were important to avoid in our show (for instance, costuming in one production was very non-period, including women in the tribe wearing high heels, something that would have been absolutely unfathomable for a group of 60s-era hippie girls).

We had also met Dr. Bill Swiggard on Saturday and we got to spend more time with him at the Archives. Bill played Claude in several of the original productions including the national Mercury Tour at the age of 19. After spending a dozen or so years as an actor, he found himself out of work in the 1980s in theater and turned to his earlier "day job" experiences as a lab technician to make a living. Bill is incredibly brilliant, and, as he saw the damage being wreaked on the theater community by the spread of HIV/AIDS, he plunged himself into finishing college despite already being in his thirties. He continued his education and ended up with both a Ph.D. from Rockefeller University in immunology and a medical degree from Cornell. In 2002, he met Nina while visiting the Hair Archives, fell in love with Massachusetts and is now a noted physician there, specializing in infectious diseases. He also donates time every week to work with AIDS patients.

Bill lives in the same town as Nina and her family, and every day, after work at the hospital, Bill came by and had dinner with all of us. We discussed politics, medicine, computers, theater, people in general, and of course, HAiR. The pictures of Bill as a 19-year old Claude are extraordinarily affecting. He is a genuinely beautiful man, who also has a genuinely beautiful soul.

Bill and Nina (along with Trevor and Annie, and their delightful Jack Russell terrier Jennifer and their cat Mouse) became family to us in just a few days, making us once again admire the quote: “There are no strangers, only friends you haven’t met yet.” Truer words were never said.

We were originally going to only spend two days in Massachusetts, and we didn’t want to overextend our welcome, but when Nina insisted that we consider coming back on Friday, we instantly changed our plans so that we could avail ourselves of another day of her amazing support and assistance. I can honestly say that there is no way we could have become better prepared for this voyage we are about to embark on (creating the San Jose production of HAiR) than spending these three days in Hatfield. What an amazing experience! What amazing people!

After three days, we finally had to bid a teary adieu to Nina, her family and Bill. We all agreed we would keep in touch by phone, email and the blogs (the Hair blog and this blog). Not only had we learned things that we couldn’t have learned any other way but we made what are sure will be four lifelong friends.

As Barb and I drove back to New York City, we played the Broadway cast album again. Not just once, but three times. All of us (me, Barb, Nina and Bill) agree that one thing about HAiR is undeniable: the music is timeless. You can listen to it over and over again and it doesn’t become jaded or stale or boring. It remains infectious and exciting no matter how many times you listen to it!

We knew that we were now ready to begin.

LET THE SUN SHINE IN!