Last weekend I went to see ‘Hair the tribal love rock musical’ at the Carisport, Cesena performed by Teatro delle erbe .
The venue doubles as an indoor basketball stadium. Despite spending a lot on the acoustics the sound quality is still pretty bad with too many dead zones. On top of this, the screwing of plastic seats onto the concrete steps on the upper levels does nothing to improve the comfort factor. Perhaps an engrossing spectacular would help you overlook these factors but ‘Hair’ is not that show.
It was always going to be a tough call to make the sixties radicalism live again especially when presented to a pretty straight provincial Italian audience. The once notorious nude scene at the end of Act One doesn’t materialise and the ‘be in’ at the show’s end is also wisely dispensed with. I for one was relieved. The inclusion of either of these scenes would have been deeply embarrassing. I’m not saying that they would offend or shock, just that they would look silly.
Because frankly the bulk of the show does come across as quite ridiculous. In the current age of widespread drug related crime and with the ravages of AIDs, the advocacy of legalising narcotics and free love no longer seem like issues of personal liberty alone.
Ultimately, the peace, love and harmony message looks as simplistically naive as it always has been. No amount of onstage hugging and animal impersonations can convince that the ‘tribe’ have any key to health and happiness.
The chief problem is that the idealism presented looks as if it could have been beamed in by aliens from Planet Spliff – what was revolutionary in New York City in the late 1960s is reduced to a cabaret of hippie clichès 40 years on. The backdrop of documentary images occasionally serves to remind us that we are viewing a historic show but this only emphasises the fact that it has nothing to say to modern audiences.
