One of the many virtues of the wonderful production of Hair currently playing at Demens Landing is its reminder that the youth movement of the late 1960s stood for a genuine revolution in American values.
Watching the passionate, perfectly rendered hippies sing and dance in this superb Park musical, you’re delighted to remember — if you’re old enough, or just love the music enough — that the flower children of 40 years ago had a daring, coherent worldview, one that included an honest ethic of love, a real acceptance of racial diversity, a rejection of money fever, a search for sexual sanity, a hatred of war and militarism and a faith that mind-altering drugs just might represent a viable response to the mystery of being alive.
When the splendid cast of this rousing American Stage show asserts that it’s the Age of Aquarius and that we should "Let the Sunshine In," there’s not a trace of irony: authors Gerome Ragni and James Rado, writing during the movement they celebrated, grasped everything that was beautiful and courageous in the counterculture, and, with composer Galt MacDermot, gave it song and, perhaps, immortality. The American Stage Hair doesn’t just bring us the music, it brings us the best of a generation’s worldview, and it’s enough to make you wonder just what you’re doing with your life now.
This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2010.
