John Moauro has been in the tribe of the Broadway revival of Hair since it was just a hippie- jacket fringe affair. The long, straight, curly, fuzzy, snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty, oily, greasy, fleecy, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, knotted, polka-dotted, twisted, beaded, braided, powered, flowered and confettied, bangled, tangled, spangled and spaghettied “tribal love-rock musical” rolls into Hartford’s Bushnell Theater April 26 through May 1.
This isn’t Moauro’s first brush with Hair. He had played the role of Claude in a college production at Kent State University, then that same role twice in regional theaters. Then, just months after he moved to New York, Moauro lucked into a tribe role in a 2007 concert version of the show. The New York Public Theater had arranged the concert to mark the 40th anniversary of its original groundbreaking Off Broadway Hair. The success of the three-night, low-cost, high-energy concert inspired producers to take a shot at a full-scale revival—a faith-leap of Aquarian proportions, since a 1977 Broadway Hair revival had run only 43 performances, and the show’s legacy has largely become limited to European tours and college productions.
Yet director Diane Paulus’ nostalgic yet aggressive and activist overhaul did the trick. By emphasizing its ever-timely anti-war and community-organizing themes, Paulus proved Hair’s worth as an eternal parable of overlooked and misunderstood factions of society fighting for what they believe in, and getting proven right pretty darn often.
“That first concert was rehearsed for under a week, then performed for three days,” Moauro marveled in a phone interview last week. “That was all the job was supposed to be. Since then, there’s been almost no downtime. My life since 2007 has been Hair, Hair, Hair.”
Moauro (who’s the red-headbanded guy in the photo above, brandishing the “I Saw God…” placard) was on Broadway with the show for two years, then traveled with the rest of the first Broadway cast to London. When the show went on tour, much of that initial cast was up for this next adventure.
“There are eight of us who were part of the original concert that are on this tour,” Moauro told me in a phone interview last week. Some who began as “Tribe” have since been promoted to lead roles such as Berger (the charismatic, misogynistic tribal leader), Claude (the conflicted Aquarian faux-Manchesterite who gets drafted midshow), Jeanie (the environmental activist who puts ther “Air” in Hair). “A few joined us in London who are on the tour,” Moauro continues. He himself understudies Woof, and occasionally gets to sing “Sodomy.”
“It’s a real family relationship we’ve built,” Moauro says. As in Hair, that family has to make do with a lot of different short-term homes. “We have to change our blocking for every venue we go into. Blocking-wise, it’s changed a lot. The staging can also depend depending on the cast. But the script, songs and the order are all the same.”
Following a month of rehearsals in New York, the Hair tour prep shifted to the old-school environs of the Shubert Theater in New Haven, where sets were constructed and technical details hammered out. It’s been said that if you can do a show at the small-for-musicals Shubert, you can do it anywhere. The Shubert’s three successful performances of Hair last October were dubbed “previews’; the opening of the tour was in Washington, D.C. and the stop in Hartford this week is the official first Connecticut engagement of Hair’s first national tour.
The Bushnell stage dwarfs the Shubert’s, and when the Hair hippies rush pell-mell out into the audience (as they frequently do—Berger’s out there from the show’s first moments) the cast’s rapid-fire reckoning of how much space and time they have to run about before regrouping back on stage must resemble thoughts that go through the heads of a scrimmaging football team. “It’s all about timing, making the right plan,” Moauro acknowledges. He’s aware of the looseness which distinguished performances of Hair back in its original Off Broadway run in the late 1960s. (For the most artful rendering of the show’s backstage excesses, read original cast member Lorrie Moore’s 1974 memoir Letting Down My Hair.) “In the original, they might decide who played which part depending on who showed up,” Moauro explains. “Girls played boy’s parts. Our show is different in that respect. Surprisingly, for the most part, this is a musically theater-trained cast. Almost everybody is trained.”
Moauro’s favorite numbers in the show, however, seem to be the least restrained, most improvisational ones: For “Hair,” we’re jumping around, running into the house, touching people’s hair, going crazy. I love doing “Aquarius,” the show opener, because it’s the first time you get to see the tribe. We show the audience that we are one. Then, the end of the show, “Let the Sunshine In, is just so beautiful.”
There have been plenty of varying Hair styles, Hair extensions and Hair-raising adventures in the show’s nearly 45-year history. But that aforementioned sense of family permeates Hair like shampoo. “The creators, the original cast—they’ve all been so supportive. They’ve all come to see the revival. We did a special performance for alumni. Jim Rado has always been affiliated with us, and is always checking in.” Rado, of course, is a co-creator of the show’s and its first Broadway Claude. He co-wrote it with Gerome Ragni (who originated the role of Berger, and who died in 1991) and composer Galt MacDermott. MacDermott has also been known to visit productions of the show from time to time; he consulted on a highly respected production at Bridgeport’s Downtown Cabaret Theatre in 2004, directed by the show’s original dance director Julie Arenal.
What keeps the show fresh is that, despite its age, it remains confrontational and unpredictable—and so do its audiences. “The hardest thing about doing the tour can be meeting different audiences every week. In New York, it was a regular theater audience, so excited to just be there seeing the show. In other cities, we don’t always know how they will react to the subject matter. Some audiences are really reserved, and some are climbing on the chairs with us.”