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