Defoliated

By T.E.K.

HAIR

Book and Lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado

Music by Galt MacDermot

The latest archaeological dig is at Manhattan's Biltmore Theater. Hair is deader than King Tut and the relics that were buried with him.

The first pop-rock musical has not changed much since its Broadway debut nine years ago. But the social climate of the '60s embraced and sustained it. The intellectual and psychological temper of the '70s is utterly alien to it. The score has a resilient, tuneful tenacity, but all that most playgoers will be able to lend the rest of the show is a deaf ear.

Hair is a cross between a Dionysian revel and an old-fashioned revival meeting. The religion, since unfrocked, that the musical preaches and more often screeches, is flower power, pot and protest. Its vocabulary is in the four-letter range, and those words are uttered like voodoo incantations by characters who qualify as preliterate. The nude scene, which was treated as a codicil to the Declaration of Independence by the show's frenetic fans in the '60s, now seems more parodistic than provocative.

The show's major bolstering prop was always offstage-- the Viet Nam War -- and its only emotional cohesion was the passions that the war aroused. Those passions are spent, the war has ended and, even more pertinently, it was lost. That is a psychic national wound from which the U.S. certainly has not recovered and which most Americans are extremely reluctant to probe. Lavish in dispraise of things American, this musical gives vent to the pent-up yowls of a generation that was overprivileged, overindulged and woefully underdisciplined.

For those who dote on exotic costuming and up-the-aisle jogging, there is much in the current revival of this defoliated musical to greet the eye, though little to feed the mind. Director Tom O'Horgan lashes up his usual theatrical typhoon with a nimble, scarcely distinguishable cast, but distraction is no substitute for destination. Hair's single saving grace is Gait MacDermot's music, especially that lovely lyrical song, Good Morning Starshine. A decade of history has written good night to Hair. -- T.E.K.

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