Hair (musical) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Edith Oliver

Critical Essay by Edith Oliver

I have mixed feelings about "Hair."… (p. 128)

"Hair" is a musical comedy about life among the hippies in New York—a mixture of humor and put-on humor and wistfulness and smugness and self-pity and baloney—and life among the hippies can grow awfully tiresome after a while. And disagreeable as well; the second act is mostly taken up with a drug party—a farewell celebration for one of the characters, who has just been drafted—and it is a distressing concept. Even so, the show does have a life of its own, which is always rare and which cancels out some of my objections. Then, too, the sight of such a patently vigorous and high-spirited bunch drooping up and down the aisles as hippies in beads, panhandling and passing out leaf-lets, is just ironic enough to make some inroads into the attendant depressing effects…. "Hair" simply could not have existed ten years ago,...
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