If you are a child of the flower power era of the late 1960s, the revival of the
HAIR rock musical now showing in the West End (London’s Gielgud Theatre) should set you on a nostalgic trip back to the time of the free-loving anti-establishment hippies. Diane Paulus's revival of HAIR, which opened in London last month with an entire Broadway company, is an exuberant production that captures the spirit of the 1960s, when a generation of young Americans who believed in flower power, love, peace, astrology and chemical experiments was sent to the Vietnam war, and sparked mass protests. The musical is about a group of young people in New York City’s East Village who band together as a tribe. The multi-racial-integrated cast gives an energetic and vibrant performance that breaks down the barrier between the stage performers and the audience. As part of the finale, the audience was invited to join the cast to dance on stage.
I was very young, just about to enter junior high school, when the original production of the hit Hair musical was first shown to rave, controversial, reviews in New York in the summer of 1968. As I was living in Hong Kong, I remember well that it was a time when American warships and aircraft carriers would bring American sailors to Hong Kong’s deep harbour, where the US service men, taking breaks from the Vietnam war, would go on shore to visit the many drinking holes in the infamous Wan Chai district of Hong Kong - then a British colony and thus an ally to the American government under Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ).
A couple of days ago, I saw the revived HAIR production in London, accompanied by a good friend from my Hong Kong school days. Although we are not exactly the flower children of the 1960s, it was a nostalgic trip that brought back memories of catholic school-girls-cum-wannabe-hippies - long hair (for both guys and gals) with flowers, beads, tie-dye kaftans, patchwork ponchos and ragged blue jeans. Innocent and naiive as we were, the songs however, in particular Aquarius, Easy to be Hard, Goodmorning Star Shine, Let the Sunshine In, reminded me of a time when we felt musically liberated, when we would go to parties where girls sat on one side of the room waiting for boys on the opposite side to come over to invite us to dance, and when guitar-strumming friends would lead us to sing folk songs written by Peter, Paul and Mary or Simon and Garfunkel even.
Youths of today may not resonate with the political and social make-up of the late 1960s, but they may find ‘fashion’ affiliation with that era. (Think of the labels
Free People,
Lucky Brand and
Urban Outfitters.) Many baby boomers may have since moved on, thankfully, but many are probably still clinging on. On a recent visit to San Francisco, my husband and I paid a visit to Castro, the district associated with the gay community in the 1960s and 70s and made famous again lately by the powerful movie MILK (about the gay activist and politician Harvey Milk), and we also took a look at the Haight and Ashbury Streets nearby, where in the 1960s it was the centre of the Hippie movement, that started just before the Summer of Love of 1967. Today, the Haight-Ashbury district remains a thriving centre of independent local businesses, and is home to independent restaurants and bars, as well as clothing boutiques, booksellers, music stores and retailers of the counter-culture.
Do check out the slide show - "Inspirations from Streets of San Francisco" above!
