Hair

This musical is a cross between a Dionysian revel and an old-fashioned revival meeting. The religion that Hair preaches, and often screeches, is flower power, pot and protest. Its music is pop-rock, and its dialogue is mostly graffiti. Hair is lavish in dispraise of all things American, except presumably liberty. The play itself borders on license by presenting a scene in which half a dozen members of the cast, male and female, face the audience in the nude. This tableau is such a dimly lit still life that it will leave most playgoers open-mouthed with yawns.

A slickly packaged Broadway version of hippiedom, Hair is now in its third incarnation. It had a limited run last fall at Joseph Papp's off-Broadway Public Theater, later surfaced at the discotheque Cheetah. Compared with this season's crop of moribund Broadway musicals, Hair thrums with vitality. Nonetheless, it is crippled by being a bookless musical and, like a boneless fish, it drifts when it should swim. Director Tom O'Horgan lashes up waves of camouflage, but distraction is no substitute for destination.

What holds Hair together is the score, which pulses with an insistent, primitive beat. With gleeful impertinence, the music by Gait MacDermot and the lyrics of Gerome Ragni and James Rado manage to release the pent-up yelps of the sons and daughters of the affluent society. A song like Ain't Got No ("Ain't got no class,/Ain't got no mother,/Ain't got no father,/Ain't got no culture") telegraphs the credo of the self-proclaimed have-nots of the '60s. Satire with a playful nip makes a treat of an air-pollution ditty ("Welcome-sulfur dioxide,/Hello--carbon monoxide,/The air, the air is everywhere"). The dance numbers are nimble but not al ways fluent, with the cast sometimes thundering about like a cattle stampede.

Since Hair chooses to stand on an attitude of dissent, mainly about Viet Nam, some of the show's thunder has been stolen by the prospective initiation of peace talks. It gives the show a split personality--musically fresh but intellectually trite and topically dated.

While hippiedom onstage may last no longer than its cultists, nudity could prove more durable. On-and off-Broadway, this has been the year of naked truth. It reflects the widening moral latitude of U.S. society, and represents the theater's attempt to recover that adult freedom of expression which films have pre-empted in recent years. Sometimes stage nudity is irrelevant, as in Bruce Jay Friedman's Scuba Duba, where a woman, both topless and pendulous, runs purposelessly down a flight of stairs. On the other hand, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, it enhances a scene of lyric sensuousness in which a girl models for her artist-lover with her back to the audience.

Off-Broadway has set the pace for nudity. Paul Foster's Tom Paine, a phantasmagorial study of the revolutionary writer, has a sequence in which men and women whirl about shielded only by draperies that occasionally part to offer fleeting glimpses of pubic hair. In Tennis Anyone? by Florence V. Hunt, the plot line not illogically calls for a nude woman to avenge herself on an insane film maker who has just raped her, with the scene played in semidarkness. Perhaps the boldest display of nudity occurred in Ed Wade's one-acter, The Christmas Turkey. In full light, and facing the audience, the unclothed heroine (Marti Whitehead) knelt on a table throughout the play as a symbol of passive white idealism. A fully dressed Negro, symbolizing angry black nationalism, devours her.

None of these ventures in the skin trade are motivated solely by a quest for esthetic freedom. Producers inevitably keep one eye on the box office and the other on the police. Under New York's present laws on obscenity, the police will not intervene unless the nude becomes lewd, itself a problematic area of interpretation. And the theater, which has always had to please the public to survive, right now has a public that seems quite content to let the stage speak more body English.

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