Theater: Hating 'Hair'

After I saw the show, a fellow on the 1 line could be heard telling two other people about how much he liked “Hair.” Then, just last Friday, a woman at a lecture I gave told me that she was thinking about going to “Hair” because she was such a fan of the show years ago.
I was not a fan. I am not a fan. I am not going to be a fan.
But I’m a sucker for a free ticket. A few weeks ago, I got a pass on Election Night to the latest version of “Hair,” unveiled last summer at the Delacorte in Central Park and now running on Broadway at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. I learned something weird about “Hair” that I never expected: I hate it.
Turns out I’m not a counter-culture guy. I’m too young and too old for 1960s nostalgia—unless it’s the political kind. I get the importance of the high-profile political assassinations and the political drama and the Civil Rights struggles and the Kennedy brothers. My dad stood overnight to pay tribute to the body of Sen. Robert Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1968. But my parents never talked much about the psychedelic aspects of the Sixties, both because they were not interested and since they were not participating.
I can see why they skipped it all.
Especially if it is well-represented in “Hair,” a show that annoyed the crap out of me. Sure, I like a little nudity as much as anyone. And if I had made myself more familiar—or far more familiar—with the music, then I would have done better as an audience member. The sixtysomething woman next to me loved those tunes, remember them and bounced along to the sounds—something problematic for me because she was obese and when she moved, I moved.
Nobody warned me that “Hair” is loud and vacuous and has only a wisp of a plot. In what existed of the story, Gavin Creel, cute and cool, played our protagonist. He was okay. I liked him better on New York 1 talking about how he and the other cast members were heading to D.C. earlier this fall to campaign for gay marriage. In the show, though, there’s an assumption that everybody older is uncool…there’s that tiresome left-wing sense that we all are in agreement that War is Bad. Creel’s Claude struggles with whether to obey the law and serve his country in a war he thinks is wrong. But there’s a lack of smarts and subtlety in the debate over the war. In fact, there is no debate. It’s just basically assumed that the Vietnam War is wrong.
I think it was. But I also think the tragic dimensions of what went wrong in the 1960s—and the huge, sometimes joyous movements that helped the nation move right—deserve a far better show. A little sophistication would not kill us, either.