Nostalgia a hairy endeavour

It could have been just another retro trip but CATHRIN SCHAER finds that a revival of Hair has relevance amid today's global upheavals.

The big conversation piece among movie-goers after viewing Intimacy, starring New Zealand actor Kerry Fox, was whether the actors had really had intercourse on camera for the sex scenes.

In his 1983 art-house coffee-table book, Teenage Lust, American photographer and director Larry Clark featured pubescent youth cavorting naked together, genitals firmly in hand.

And in a number one song in this country, Because I Got High, the artist known as Afroman tells how he would have had a job, cleaned his room and made love but for the fact he was too high from smoking marijuana. And no one seems to have been particularly worried.

So what impact can a musical such as Hair have when we've seen and done it all? A revival of the show in Australia didn't do well. Can it have any relevance to modern youth? Should it expect any audiences apart from the nostalgic?

In 1972 New Zealand became infamous as the only country in the world to take the "tribal love-rock musical" to court.

The musical, first performed on Broadway in 1968, was controversial because of its subject matter - a tribe of hippies avoiding the draft for the Vietnam War, preaching peace and practising free love. The musical questioned morality, sexuality, racism, violence and drug use. It also featured bad language, more hair than New Zealand men had ever worn on their heads and faces and a scene where the whole cast shed its clothes.

"The charge was lewd behaviour," recalls Phil Warren, who was one of the promoters of the musical in the 70s. (He is now chairman of the Auckland Regional Council.)

As the trial began and the show went on regardless, Warren remembers how every morning the police would come to collect props with swear words written on them.

"They'd take them to court as evidence and then they'd politely return them for the evening's performance.

"Yes, there was a bit of humour about the whole thing. And the promoters were pleased because, well, you couldn't buy that kind of publicity. The trial was an absolute godsend; it generated so much interest."

The charges were thrown out.

"No, it would never happen again today," Warren agrees. "There's just no comparison. I mean, they were using bad language on a scale that had never been heard before in New Zealand in public. But now you hear that kind of language on television every night ... There's much more freedom of expression and a greater emphasis on human rights."

Yet, while he suspects the majority of the Auckland Theatre Company's audiences will be attending for reasons of nostalgia, Warren believes some of the issues that Hair raises are still relevant today.

"Unfortunately, it's all happening again," he muses, "except we seem to be replacing Vietnam with Afghanistan."

Sixteen-year-old Aucklander Jonathan MacAvoy, who saw a rehearsal of the new Hair last weekend, agrees.

"It's relevant to my generation because of what's happening now," he says, referring to the conflict in Afghanistan. "And with the whole hippie thing, you tended to think it was all about drugs and sex.

"But I've realised there was more to it than that. They had a good message - they were anti-war and talked about the pointlessness of war."

As for the music, MacAvoy, a self-described "musical liberal" who lists bands such as Smashing Pumpkins and Coldplay among his favourites, describes the Hair tunes as "entertaining" and the show as "awesome and energetic".

"I think dance culture is a lot more about being in the moment," he says.

More hedonistic, you mean?

"Yeah, exactly. Whereas with the hippies they seemed to have more meaning to what they were doing. And their message still seems pretty important."

* Hair opens at Sky City Theatre on Friday and runs until December 16.