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Woodstock Playhouse revives Hair opening this Thursday

byPaul Smart

August 04, 2011 10:21 AM | 0 | 3 | |

As director Sidney Erik Wright puts it, ten days into repertory rehearsals for the new production of Hair coming to the Woodstock Playhouse this weekend, by the time he showed up in town, the 18 cast members who started performing in A Chorus Line two months ago were already close enough to be the “tribe” that centers the now-classic musical from 1967. But that doesn’t make the challenges of a partially vertical set, complex ensemble songs and tight choreography made to appear freestyle any lighter.

“Wow,” says a young woman, perched on top of a theatrical brick wall in the urban oasis depicted onstage, “it’s very high up here.” Nevertheless, within minutes everyone’s leaping up into standing positions onto the set’s walls, or finessing aided flips and balletlike rises off them. Wright allows everyone to play onstage – their first time within the theater since Anything Goes closed last week. Then he asks them to take five and reassemble.

A folk ballad, Jonilike in its plaintive evocation of a past generation’s lost innocence, plays quietly over the theater’s speaker system. Then Wright gathers everyone into a silent, handholding circle, heads touching together at the center. Over the next hour, actors work out their set pieces on “the levels,” getting comfortable with leaps and jumps and figuring out who needs to spot whom for some of the more possibly dangerous moves that will be taking place. Throughout this process, the songs are half-sung just enough for the power of this musical, whose soundtrack albums once seemed to fill every home in America, to reassert itself.

“This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” the ensemble sings as a gate’s locks are cut and the tribe enters an urban garden rendered at that point where it’s returning to nature. Things move on to the still-irreverent “Donna,” an ode to a 16-year-old virgin; an ode to illicit drugs, “Hashish”; and “Colored Spade,” in which the character Hud outlandishly suggests the eventual presence of a black president.

The tech crew gets called in to fix some coverings on the upper platform levels; a props person okays a cast member’s request to sew patches onto his satchel. Wright reorganizes one piece of choreography from free-form circle dancing to a step-step-hop move with individualistic arm motions. Another popcornlike response to the listings of the song, “Ain’t Got No,” snaps into resplendent focus after several run-throughs.

The last time that I saw this troupe, a few weeks back, they had just gotten on this newly revived stage for the first time in rehearsal for A Chorus Line, the triumphant season-opener for the region’s first new summer stock season in decades. Now Wright is telling me how excited he is by the “real place” set with which he’s working here, instead of the more stylized stages on which Hair has been performed in recent years.

“I know the musical from its revival put on by the Public a few years ago,” the director says, dismissing the liberties taken by Miloš Forman’s film adaptation of the late 1970s. “Given how essential the idea of ‘the tribe’ is to this, I couldn’t ask for a tighter ensemble to work with.”

Yes, I later realize how many people played in Hair over the years, from co-authors James Rado and Gerome Ragni (music was by veteran songsmith Galt MacDermot) to Ben Vereen, Meat Loaf, Diane Keaton, Keith Carradine, Melba Moore and Tim Curry. But all blended into the tribe – just as individual productions, starting with its premiere at Joe Papp’s Public Theater, were inevitably trumped by its dozens of touring productions throughout the US, Canada and Europe, designed as much to end the war in Vietnam as the gathering of fame and riches.

But enough of such musings; Wright has called for silence. A run-through of the first half of the first act of Hair is starting, and being the only audience member, I’m assaulted by an endless stream of characters, all making their tribal points about breaking all that came before and loosening up. I get mooned, jeered, kissed and waved at – but also enthralled at the bright enthusiasm and total vigor of the performance, from all ends. Who cares, I think, readying to leave as Wright reads notes on what we’ve just witnessed, if the cast is going to need wigs? “Flow it, show it, long as God can grow it,” run the lyrics, “my hair...” And all our lasting images of the ‘60, and that lost promise now descended into constant Congress-watching, are encapsulated and carried forward to us by this single piece of theater.

Hair plays in summer stock at the Woodstock Playhouse Thursdays through Sundays from Thursday, August 4 through Saturday, August 13, with eight performances including a special Wednesday matinee on August 10. The Woodstock Playhouse is located at 103 Mill Hill Road, near the gateway to Woodstock, with a box office open Wednesdays through Fridays from 2:30 to 5:30 p.m. For further information and online reservations, call (845) 679-6900 or visit www.woodstockplayhouse.org.