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As the "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical" Hair made
its journey from Broadway in New York, to London's West End and then on
to Australia, its reputation preceded it.
Its liberal use of four-letter words and its famous "nude scene", during which the cast — or "the tribe," as they were known — stripped completely naked on stage, drew the ire of censors worldwide.
And in Australia, as legendary producer Harry M Miller announced plans to bring Hair to Sydney in 1969, he did so in defiance of a conservative state government that was cracking down on "obscenity" in the arts.
In Victoria, too, where Hair opened in 1970, the Henry Bolte government made it a crime to use "obscene language" or to behave "indecently" in public.
As theatre historian and director Julian Meyrick explains, it allowed the government to police what was happening in Australian theatres: "Henry Bolte … sent the vice squad off to theatre previews all over Victoria to make sure people weren't using the F-word or taking their clothes off."
By 1969, several actors in Victoria had been charged with obscenity under the act.
According to Meyrick, the crackdown in Victoria "osmotically transferred itself to New South Wales politics".
In the NSW government led by Robert Askin, censorship was the domain of his chief secretary, Eric Willis. And as opening night of Hair approached, the question was: would it be allowed to open at all?
'No sane person could possibly find offence in Hair'
Hair was written by two out-of-work American actors, Gerome Ragni and James Rado. Both had become inspired by the hippie movement and embedded themselves in the New York scene, documenting the hippies' activities and philosophy.The musical they wrote as a result stretched the expected boundaries of the genre, doing away with a structured narrative in favour of hallucinatory vignettes based around the experiences of two hippies — Claude and Berger — and their "tribe" as they wrestle with issues of liberation (sexual and otherwise), responsibility and morality after Claude receives a draft notice from the US Army.
"Hair arrived at a crossroads for the theatre, for the musical, and for both Australian and American society," says Meyrick.
"Ideas of what a musical could be were changing, ideas of what was permissible on stage were changing, and ideas of what society should be doing in life were changing."And it came at a time when opposition to the war in Vietnam, and conscription, was reaching its peak.
Hair premiered on Broadway and the West End in 1968 and plans for an Australian production were announced shortly after.
On Broadway it had drawn consternation from censors and establishment figures, but eventually opened unedited.
On the West End, producers delayed opening the musical until stage censorship rules were revoked.
In the lead-up to its Sydney premiere, a war of words began between the show's producer, Harry M Miller, and Chief Secretary Willis, who had announced plans to attend a preview and determine whether Hair should be allowed to open.
But the erudite producer Miller seemed to relish in the controversy, seeing its potential for free publicity. He taunted Willis in the press.
"No sane person could possibly find offence in Hair," Miller was quoted as saying in the Sydney Morning Herald.
"If they do, any painting by Rubens, or Botticelli, or Michelangelo is obscene and crude. Any sculpture by the world's leading sculptors is obscene."
His gamble paid off. Willis allowed Hair to open.
Hair director Jim Sharman wrote in his memoir that "[Miller] orchestrated events so that the act of denying [Sydney] the opportunity to see this controversial show would confirm Australia's provincial status. His press campaign began to turn the censorious tide, and banning the show became a less appetising political option."
Despite allowing it to be performed, Willis couldn't help firing a departing volley. He told the Sydney Morning Herald, "I cannot possibly support the way Hair lampoons accepted standards of morality and loudly proclaims almost every known vice, from blasphemy and drug-taking to homosexuality and draft-dodging."
But even Eric Willis had to acknowledge that Hair was something we'd never seen in theatres before, adding: "However, it is cleverly presented and quite revolutionary as a form of theatre."
The tide of opinion was shifting against censorship in the arts, and the government intervention seen in the mid-60s became less common.
A year later, Hair opened in Melbourne without incident.
'It allowed people an awakening'
Many of Australia's best-loved performers got their start in Hair, including Marcia Hines, who moved to Australia from the United States just to be in it after auditioning for Harry M Miller in Boston.Aside from being her first major gig, Hines remembers the revolutionary change that Hair promised.
"We really believed we were going to change the world," she recalls. "It allowed people an awakening."
Fellow tribe member John Waters says he felt the same way.
"It's probably the seminal moment [of my life], because I learned so much. There was a lot I wanted to know about the counterculture — the alternatives to what we'd inherited from the previous generation — and I learned all the time during Hair."
A large part of Hair's energy was driven by its youthful cast. Director Jim Sharman was just 24 years old, and most of the cast were even younger.
"Unlike some other productions where they used Broadway singer-dancers, [Sharman] got kids like us, with very little experience," Waters says. "We were the real deal and I think that showed on stage."
But Waters remembers that the looseness of the young tribe and their lack of experience did frustrate some.
"Harry M Miller at one stage said, 'This is anarchy. I've got to do something about this', and he brought in professionals like Reg Livermore. But instead of Reg smartening us up, we got to him."
Livermore himself recalls that he wanted to be in Hair more than anything.
"I was desperate to get into the show. When I saw a preview, it suddenly awakened my senses to what was possible in the theatre," he says.
"I thought of it as a release, offering me a freedom that I hadn't had previously."Although the influence of the hippie subculture waned through the 1970s, and Hair's promised "age of Aquarius" failed to dawn, the musical had a lasting impact on theatre.
"Hair led the way to [Jesus Christ] Superstar, and then came The Rocky Horror Show," says Livermore.
"It was because of Hair that that was possible. It was a great stepping stone. The theatre was suddenly a place that … didn't have to be [so structured]."
Julian Meyrick argues that Hair also led to a new wave of Australian work that helped cement the reputations of local theatre companies such as Sydney's Nimrod Theatre and Melbourne's Pram Factory.
"[Hair is] tightly correlated to the kinds of shows that seemed to pop like a champagne cork at that time," Meyrick says, citing as examples The Legend of King O'Malley (written by Bob Ellis and Michael Boddy) and Marvellous Melbourne (written by Jack Hibberd and John Romeril).
In addition to newfound energy and freedom from censorship, Meyrick also says Hair's loose structure influenced Australian theatre-makers, inspiring them to "not think of structure as the be-all and end-all of the theatrical experience — that there are things in the theatre other than just seeing a show with a beginning, middle and end.
"The show, I think, touched so many practitioners on the level of meaning rather than on the level of rules."
One of those was director Rex Cramphorn.
"He wrote endlessly about how much Hair affected him. And you wouldn't normally think of Rex, who's quite an austere classicist and an experimenter, as somebody who would be blown away by an American musical, but he was.
"It released something in the people who saw it."
A new production of Hair is touring to Perth, Geelong, Wyong, Wollongong, Sydney and the Gold Coast until October.
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