Aquarius redux

Break out the love beads and buckskin fringe. Hair is back.

Subtitled The American Tribal Love/Rock Musical, Hair was one of the most popular and controversial plays of the 1960s, a Broadway smash for the “sex, drugs and rock-and-roll” generation, sparking radio hits and national protests.

In October, Washington University’s Performing Arts Department (PAD) in Arts & Sciences will revive this countercultural classic as its fall Mainstage production.

Performances begin at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 7 and 8, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 9, in Edison Theatre. Performances continue the following weekend at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Oct. 14 and 15; and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 16.

Tickets are $15 — $9 for students, senior citizens and Washington University faculty and staff — and are available through the Edison Theatre Box Office, (314) 935-6543, and all MetroTix outlets. Edison theatre is located in the Mallinckrodt Student Center, 6445 Forsyth Blvd. For more information, call (314) 935-6543.

Hair boasts a provenance as scruffy as its characters. The brainchild of Gerome Ragni and James Rado — a pair of out-of-work actors who wrote the book and lyrics to music by Galt MacDermot — it debuted at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theater in October 1967 but soon moved to the Cheetah, a mid-town go-go club, before closing altogether.

Yet producers opened a revised version the following year at Broadway’s Biltmore Theater and it also found warm receptions in Chicago, London, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Authorities in Boston and Chattanooga, however, objected to the show’s language and nudity and attempted bans that were ultimately struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The loosely plotted story, set in Greenwich Village in 1968, focuses on Claude, a young man from Oklahoma who befriends a group of hippies (known as the Tribe), rejects Traditional American Values and confronts the specter of Vietnam. Yet Hair really functions as a kind of psychedelic revue, propelled by a full rock score (the first on Broadway) and chart-topping tunes like Aquarius, Let the Sunshine In, Easy to be Hard and the title song.

“Hair is not so much a play as a happening,” said Jeffery S. Matthews, senior lecturer, who directs the cast of 28. “It’s the product of a very particular moment. It’s happy and fun and the songs are great, but it does have some harder edges. There’s love but there’s also cruelty.

“We tend to look back on things as being warmer than they were,” Matthews continued. “Those were explosive times — the Detroit Riots, the ’68 Democratic Convention, the Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassination… I think it’s important to remember that sense of danger and urgency.”

Matthews was also struck by parallels between Vietnam and the present conflict in Iraq, particularly during last year’s presidential election.

“So much of the election echoed back to Vietnam,” he mused. “We’re still not really over it as a nation and Iraq has reopened a lot of those wounds. Even though the wars are very different — there’s no draft now, the world is a different place — the resonances seemed very powerful and very real.”

The cast is led by Reynolds Whalen as Claude; Carolina Reiter as Sheila, the politically active NYU student; and by J Reese and Justin Huebener as Tribe members Berger and Woof. Also featured are Jeffrey Taylor as Hud; Noga Landau as Crissy; Elizabeth Birkenmeier as Jeanie; Sari Abraham as Dionne; and Jake Levine-Sisson as Margaret Mead.

Sets are by David Kruger, visiting artist-in-residence. Costumes are by Bonnie Kruger, senior lecturer. Musical director is Al Fischer, a freelance musician and musical director. Choreography is by Christine Knoblauch-O’Neal, senior lecturer and director of the Ballet Program.