I also have no doubt that the original "Hair," back in 1967, before most of its current devotees were born, was as mind-blowing and game-changing as everyone says. Even as it left me cold in its new form, I could think back a few decades and imagine how fresh, how freeing, how joyously wild it must have been.
But it has not, to put it mildly, aged well. What may once have seemed winningly ingenuous and gently rebellious now feels unbearably naive and unforgivably glib. The antiwar sentiments of the show are still painfully relevant but uselessly one-dimensional, and beyond that there's . . . what? Drug jokes, sex jokes, squares-vs.-hippie jokes, and a lot of other stuff that must have sounded a little corny even the first time around.
Well, there is the music, of course. And those of us who grew up to "Aquarius" and "Good Morning Starshine" and "Let the Sun Shine In" do, undeniably, get the slight if giddy pleasure of hearing Galt McDermot's light little tunes again. But you are perhaps forgetting just how many other songs there are in this score, and just how many of them sound alike, and just how tired you will get of hearing some of them even one more time.
Part of what makes them tiresome this time around is that they are all, in our modern fashion, heavily amplified. That means that even in the famous nude tableau, the body microphones never come off. And few things are more depressing than watching a musical that purports to celebrate freedom and spontaneity while requiring its performers to sing with wires.
The packaged feeling extends to Karole Armitage's choreography, which has even the wild "drug" scenes feeling tightly controlled and minutely organized. The members of the Tribe (you know, the chorus) rush up and down the aisles, hugging and jumping on seats and leaning out from the boxes, but not a single movement feels spontaneous or real. It's like sitting in the middle of a giant commercial for, oh, Gap Tie-Dye or McPot.
