Hair (musical) Critical Essay | Critical Essay by William Kloman

Critical Essay by William Kloman

"Hair" will be the "West Side Story" of the sixties. The difference between the two shows illustrates how far we've come in a decade. "West Side Story" had vigorous music, but a smarmy social conscience. It now seems awfully dated. In good liberal fashion, it romanticized the lower classes to within an inch of their downtrodden lives. Events have outrun its message, and the vision of slum gangs dancing into battle would probably strike today's young audience as odd, if not funny….

"Hair's" godparents are Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Marcuse, the prophet of polymorphous perversity…. Love, in "Hair," comes interracial, intrasexual, and in multiples of three. As well as the regular way….

"Marat/Sade," and now "Hair," bear the same relationship to an Ibsen play that a collage does to a realistic landscape. The new theater insists that its audience relinquish their demand for traditional structure. "A play is not a...
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