Hair!

A tour company of this show is playing at the Pantages this month. What a fun show! And so much more contemporary than I imagined. I pictured a fun show with hippies and cool music, which this was. However, the show was also surprisingly relevant. Yesterday was the memorial service in Tucson for the victims of the mass shooting. I had been listening to President Obama's speech just before dinner. The very first song, Age of Aquarius, starts by predicting a time of peace and love. Apparently we're still waiting for that time. The things that made Hair! shocking in 1967 (drugs, sex, nudity, irreverence towards the flag, etc.) may not be so shocking to us. People can wear their hair at any length now, but there's always something that young kids are wearing that leads their elders to despair. And we may not have the draft anymore, but there are still young people who are in the military because they have very few choices in life who are fighting wars in strange and far away places.

The performers come off the stage and into the audience a lot throughout the show, sometimes talking to audience members or dancing with them.  The Pantages is a huge theatre, so the effect of this is more muted than if we had been in a smaller theatre (for example similar to my experience at Fela! in New York in October). Many of the people in the audience looked like they could have been around to see the original show back in the late 60s. At the end of the show, which ends with the refrain Let The Sunshine In, when the lights come back for the cast to take their bows, they play the refrain over and over again and wave the audience onto the stage and the entire stage fills up with people dancing. Those of us in the audience sang along swaying from side to side. A really amazing experience.