The New Criterion

The musical Hair has a privileged place in American culture. Its songs, particularly classics like “Aquarius,” “Good Morning Starshine,” and “Let the Sun Shine In,” are deeply familiar, an inescapable part of the soundtrack of American life in the second half of the twentieth century. Lots of people have seen Milos Forman’s 1979 filmed version. How many, though, have seen the musical itself? It opened at the Public Theater in 1967, subsequently moving to Broadway’s Biltmore Theater where it played for four years; therefore only people well launched in middle age, at the very least, can have seen the original production; regional, stock, and amateur productions are few and far between. We know Hair more as what we think it stands for—peace, love, joy, free love—than for the darker and more disturbing drama it actually presents.

Seeing the full-scale revival at the Delacorte in Central Park, I was taken aback by what a strong, expert, powerful show Hair turns out to be. All its fine qualities have been heightened by Diane Paulus’s staging, and as a matter of fact this is the best production I have ever seen at the Delacorte in more than thirty years of attending Shakespeare in the Park. Joseph Papp’s conception of his summer festival as a democratic, anti-elitist institution has all too often extended to anti-elitist casting, and there is usually at least one stinkingly bad performance in every show there. I’m tempted to say that the 2006 Meryl Streep Mother Courage hit rock bottom, but now that I think of it I can recall a Richard II from the 1980s that was even worse, with Peter MacNicol playing the title role exactly in the style of manic diet guru Richard Simmons. And the Public’s commitment to non-traditional casting, while laudable in theory, is sometimes carried to ludicrous extremes.

Paulus has not only infused Hair with extremely high energy, which of course is what the show is all about, but has cast it brilliantly with young, beautiful, hugely talented, and big-voiced performers who belt out the almost continuous musical numbers stunningly. (I would like to put in a special word for Acme Sound Partners, who have miked the show to perfection; the volume is amped up, appropriately for a rock show, but each lyric can be heard with crystalline clarity.) Among this really superior cast the standouts are Will Swenson, who delivers an electrifyingly energetic performance as the charismatic Berger, self-proclaimed leader of the Tribe (though he is clearly too old to be in high school, as the script would have us believe); the melancholic and gentle Christopher J. Hanke as Claude, doomed to die in Vietnam (having seen the play during its two-week extension, I missed seeing star-in-the-making Jonathan Groff of Spring Awakening fame in the role, as he had other commitments to fulfill); and two vocally gifted young women, Caren Lyn Manuel as the flower-child Sheila and Patina Renea Miller as Dionne.

Paulus and the surviving authors, James Rado and Galt MacDermot, have resisted the temptation to tinker with the script so as to make the story (what little story there is in this concert-style show) more pertinent, or “relevant” as the lingo goes, to today’s situation—its relevance being perfectly obvious already. No, this is a history play, set squarely in its own era without any annoyingly knowing references to current events. And the set designer Scott Pask and the costume designer Michael McDonald have captured the look of that era very well, if my own memories can be trusted. The costume designer Jane Greenwood once told me that it is much easier to do a play set in the distant past, for example a Molière play, than one in the recent past, because no one is alive who remembers what things looked like in 1680 but lots of people remember 1980. Rather fewer people will remember 1967, but this certainly looked like the real thing to me.

In fact, the production succeeded so nicely in recreating not only the sound and look but the feel of that time and place that I found myself for the next couple of days in a strange frame of mind, thinking it all over with a mixture of nostalgia and sadness. If the hippies were guilty of hubris when they imagined they could change the world, then they have been amply punished, for today we seem farther than ever from peace, love, and understanding, and the generation that came of age in the 1960s has done no more to further these ideals than their forefathers did—indeed they seem to have done worse on every possible level. Even the hippies’ vaunted individualism quickly became yet another form of social tyranny: as is usually the case in human history, one set of conventions got thrown out only for a new one to take its place. Having been a junior high school student during the hippies’ heyday in the late 1960s, I can attest to the fact. Every girl at my school who had the means flocked to a Manhattan boutique called, ironically enough, The Different Drummer, to purchase what was in effect a hippie uniform.

And yet many of the hippies were beautiful and idealistic, as this production reminds us—a fact we are liable to forget when faced with the scuzzy old relics who hang out in little time warps like Woodstock and Berkeley. Hair is about the waste of war, yes, but it is also about the generous lushness of youth, a fleeting instant of perfection that the naïve and inexperienced young people themselves hardly know what to do with. “Where Do I Go?” is the play’s most moving ballad, describing not just Claude’s confusion over his impending departure for the Vietnamese jungles but all young people’s uncertainty of what life is for and what they should make of it. The Tribe hanging out in Central Park is theatrically reminiscent of the Lost Boys on Peter Pan’s island, and Berger’s quip—“They’ll never get me, I’m gonna stay high forever”—is another version of Peter Pan’s “I don’t ever want to be a man. I always want to be a little boy and to have fun.” Berger did grow up, of course; perhaps he is that gray-haired hedge-fund manager over there in the fifth row.

Hair’s producers have slated it for a Broadway run this fall, a terrific idea. But it will be hard for the production team to recreate the sylvan enchantment they achieved in Central Park; the way the Tribe assembled mysteriously from the surrounding trees at the top of the show and the music echoing through the dark night were as magical as the fairies’ first appearance in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

If the mid-1960s marked the beginning of one era, it also marked the end of another. Nineteen-sixty-six saw Noël Coward’s last play appear in the West End. Coward’s work had fallen out of fashion, and his previous play, Waiting in the Wings, a skillful and sensitive piece about decrepit actresses banished to an old age home, had been unfairly panned by the critics. Knowing that his declining health would soon necessarily put an end to his acting career, Coward went in search of a vehicle to bring it to a dignified close. As his friend Cole Lesley remembered it, “The dream seemed sometimes unlikely to materialize: effective star parts for men in their mid-sixties do not grow on trees, and moreover both the part and the play would have to be certain, as far as one can ever be certain, of success. The idea of Noël appearing, possibly for the last time, in a failure was unthinkable.”

The obvious answer was for Coward to write the vehicle himself, and he came up with an evening of three short plays entitled Suite in Three Keys. The longest and most substantial of the pieces was A Song at Twilight—and the most personal and provocative as well. It centers upon an aging writer, famous and lauded, who has managed to keep his homosexuality a secret throughout his career but at great cost both to his personal life and his work. This unpleasant character was clearly modeled on Somerset Maugham, who had outraged Coward by publishing a dishonest heterosexual memoir in which he made vicious and uncalled-for attacks on his long-suffering wife, the decorator Syrie Maugham. But parallels with Coward’s own career could not be avoided: he, too, had hidden his sexuality for decades; he, like his protagonist Sir Hugo Latymer, had washed his hands of a long-term lover who became a “bad debt” by descending into boorish alcoholism. It was brave of Coward to write the role, and braver still to perform it, for on the West End stage in 1966 such material was still shocking and somewhat sensational.

Suite in Three Keys was well received in London. The following year Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, and Anne Baxter performed an abridged version, Noël Coward in Two Keys (comprising only A Song at Twilight and one of the two shorter plays, Come Into the Garden, Maud) on Broadway, where it had less success—possibly because New York, shaken up by Hair and other signs of the times, had moved forward more quickly than Coward had. Since then it has been seen only very occasionally, which is too bad since it shows a serious, almost didactic side of Coward that is not unattractive. It makes us wonder what sort of writer he might have developed into had he lived thirty or forty years later, when the sort of love he wrote about obliquely in plays like Design for Living could finally speak its name. This past August, audiences were treated to a rare opportunity to see Noël Coward in Two Keys at the Berkshire Theater Festival in Stockbridge, Massachussetts, directed by Vivien Matalon, who mounted both the original London and New York productions. (Matalon took on the task of directing the Master with some trepidation, asking him first whether he wanted a director or a stage manager.)

This time Matalon, with an ace design team made up of R. Michael Miller (scenery), David Murin (costumes), and Ken Billington (lighting), was given a free hand to do things his way, and the result was an artfully staged evening with an out-of-time feel, one foot in the modern era and one in the 1930s. Both plays take place in the same sitting room of a private suite in a grand hotel in Lausanne, Switzerland (Coward, it should be noted, came up with this idea several years before Neil Simon did it in Plaza Suite), and Miller’s scenic design is executed more elegantly, and more realistically, than one usually expects to see in summer theater. Matalon chose his actresses well: in A Song at Twilight, Maureen Anderman was very funny as Carlotta, the sardonic elderly actress, an old flame of Sir Hugo’s, who has come to dine with him and rake up bits of his past he would rather forget, while Mia Dillon, who has been a solid presence in character roles on- and off-Broadway for thirty years, was both comic and moving as Sir Hugo’s unfortunate German wife, the butt of all his bad moods and cruel humor. Casey Biggs was serviceable as Sir Hugo but did not exactly provide a star turn, making me think longingly of what Coward or Cronyn must have done with the part. He was better as the laconic, henpecked American husband in Come Into the Garden, Maud (one reels at the thought of Coward in that role, though he himself seems to have been undaunted by its challenges: “It’s so easy to play Americans. All you have to do is say ‘Hi, folks’ very loudly, and then do the rest in English”).

It is also a pleasure just to spend an evening at the Berkshire Theater Festival, with its spacious old-fashioned structure, originally designed as the Stockbridge Casino by Stanford White, and its cosy bar decorated by countless posters and photographs of the famous performers and productions that have appeared there in the Festival’s eighty-year history—the first BTF production featured Eva Le Gallienne, and BTF apprentices have included Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

A. R. Gurney’s Buffalo Gal has just received its first production in New York, although it appeared at Williamstown in the summer of 2000 and in Buffalo two years later. Why is this? It’s true that it is not one of Gurney’s very best plays, but everything he writes is worth seeing, and one would think that he has enough of a built-in audience to easily sell out a short run. This seems to have been the case; I went on the very last night of its engagement at New York’s Primary Stages and there were several enthusiasts literally begging for tickets outside the door. Perhaps inspired by their hit of last season, Dividing the Estate—soon to transfer to Broadway—written by the nonagenarian Horton Foote, Primary Stages has temporarily abandoned the always-uphill battle for young audiences by plumping for a safe season of plays by well-established oldsters: Gurney, Lee Blessing, Donald Margulies, and Tina Howe.

Buffalo Gal is a take on Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard—but then, come to think of it, so was Dividing the Estate. Gurney’s Madame Ranevskaya is Amanda (Susan Sullivan), a lovely actress in late middle age who left Buffalo as an ambitious teenager, achieved fame in TV series and soap operas, and is now coming back to her home town in an effort to revive her fading career with a return to the stage in a classic role—that of Madame Ranevskaya herself in The Cherry Orchard.

Gurney observes the unities: the play’s entire action occurs in the course of the first day of rehearsals, on stage at the regional theater where The Cherry Orchard is to be performed. Amanda is greeted and deftly handled by the director Jackie (Jennifer Regan), the stage manager Roy (James Waterston), the assistant stage manager Debbie (Carmen M. Herlihy), and her co-star James (Dathan B. Williams). They have dealt with difficult performers before and are well aware that Amanda’s grande dame airs and impossible demands, made with cloying sweetness, are attributable only to her fears about being back on stage after so many years—still, she is sorely trying.

Channeling Marion Seldes and Katharine Hepburn at their most affected while at the same time gently indicating her character’s vulnerabilities, Sullivan does such a good job that we end up liking the infuriating Amanda. Her nostalgia for Buffalo, however theatrically expressed, is real after all, and so is her wish to be a “serious” actress rather than a television goddess. Her affection for her old flame Dan (Mark Blum), now a local dentist, is also genuine. But like Jackie, we are always aware that her fantasies about moving back to her hometown are just that—fantasies. In the end, she is a cold realist and will follow the money.

And in any case, her remembered Buffalo is little more than a phantom. Those few of the lovely old houses that are left are now mostly charitable institutions, and Amanda’s own family domicile is up for sale. Reminiscing with James, she remembers a favorite spot from their childhood. “Is it still there?” she asks; to which James sagely responds, “Nothing’s still there.” How true.