GROWING UP WITH HAIR

Last night, about forty years after it first captured my heart from behind a basement door, “Hair” won the Tony award for Best Musical Revival. And as I sat in my living room, watching the awards on television with my husband and two sons about forty years later, I savored the moment that all these years of singing the score, word by word, had built up to. Years, decades of anticipating the revival of a musical that had remained the best show I had almost never seen.

Growing up in Long Island, my parents often carted us in to the city to see Broadway shows. If we didn’t already have tickets in hand, we would stand in line at the TKTS booth in Times Square for up to three hours before the curtain to score what was available on ‘the boards.’ My first musical was “Pippin” (we missed Ben Vereen and John Rubenstein). Then came “The Magic Show,” (with Doug Henning - an understudy would’ve been ridiculous, really) and “Shenandoah.” Those that followed came fast and furious: “A Chorus Line,” “Annie,” “Evita (missed Patti Lupone),” “They’re Playing Our Song (Diana Canova and Ted Wass),” "On the 20th Century" (Imogene Coca and introduction to the incredible Kevin Kline) "Pirates of Penzance” (Treat Williams, missed Kline, Robbie Benson, missed Linda Ronstadt),” “Sweeney Todd” (Len Cariou but missed Angela Lansbury - although Dorothy Loudon was brilliant) and a slew of others I can’t remember. We also covered plenty of plays: “Tribute” (Jack Lemon, Robbie Benson), “Fifth of July” (Christopher Reeve, who looked fetching as a friend snapped a photo of us outside the backstage door), “Crimes of the Heart,” to name a few. But it was "Hair," which I had never seen, which called out to me from beyond its Broadway run, year after year after year.

Unfortunately, those visits to the city didn’t begin until five years after “Hair” opened in the spring of 1968 at the Biltmore. Not long after its debut, my parents returned home from the theater late on a Saturday night. Following that evening, they played the Broadway cast album of “Hair,” over and over again. For us kids, at least the older ones in our tribe (11, 10, and 8), it was the dawning of the age of hair, literally. Hair and bell bottoms, flower power, and peace signs. Make love, not war, whatever that meant. Let the sun shine in. But whenever my parents put on the album, and the third song came on (“Sodomy”), we were suddenly, abruptly sent downstairs to the basement to play. As I listened from behind the closed door, listening for words like “shit” or even “fuck,” I heard nothing offensive, nothing at all. I couldn't figure out where those inappropriate words were. Sodomy? No...Fellatio? So far, so good. OK, next? Nothing. So, as the lyrics inquire, “why do these words sound so nasty?” I should have just asked. Where the hell was fuck?

It was an early morning in July, 2008. The alarm went off at 6:30a.m., and I quietly dragged my weary body out of bed. I threw on some clothes, packed a small bag with a muffin and a small thermos of coffee, grabbed a folding beach chair, and set out for Central Park. "Hair," the second Public Theater production to be presented in the Park for the summer, for free, was on.

A friend had already secured a place in line for the ticket hand-outs before I arrived (two tickets per person for that evening's performance), but it was all for naught. The rules of queuing up for Shakespeare in the Park were, are, iron clad. You cannot hold a place in line for anyone. You can’t take turns being on shift. Unless you’re making a trip to the bathroom, and you'd do best to inform those people around you when you do, you cannot leave your spot. Not for a Starbucks, not for a game of Frisbee, not for nothing. Once I arrived, we had to give up my friend's spot in exchange for the last one on line. These are the cold, hard rules, and mostly everyone takes it very seriously. When you go through the pain of dragging yourself out of bed while it's still dark to wait for hours in line until the box office opens, it's only fair that everyone else suffers along with you. So throughout the wait, Papp Public Theater personnel will heartily ‘remind’ you through a megaphone the rules of the game.

The line snakes around the Great Lawn along the western edge, bending east. You sit in your beach chair alongside your friend with your newspaper, thermos and picnic breakfast. Or even better, you can order from Andy’s deli – they take your info and deliver inside of 20 minutes (I’m Diana, around the first bend about 100 feet from the restrooms, and under the White Birch, next to the Rock of Hope – the point in line at which you’re almost guaranteed a ticket.) The delivery guy bikes along the line until he finds you, calling out your name. It's almost like a day at the beach. Better.

To get to the point, I won’t review the performance. But suffice it to say, "Hair" was, and now, as the Best Musical revival on Broadway, is everything I’d been hoping for since I was an 8-year-old girl (there was a revival in the late 70s, but it came and went too soon after the original).

"Hair" shines with a luster as flawless and evident today as I'd been imagining it did all those years ago. This production was so rich, in fact, so beautifully exhilarating, that I waited in line from the early morning hours all over again two weeks later, to share the final performance with my older son. And as that final queue - forgive me - that receding Hair-line inched its way toward the box office for the last time at approximately 1pm on that gorgeous, sparkling, lazy summer afternoon, I felt comfort and joy knowing that my son would see some brief nudity, hear completely inappropriate language, and experience the theater as he may never again experience it in his lifetime.