'60s play has musical message today
Bv Matt Wolf
Associated Press Writer
LONDON—In a darkened London auditorium where "Hair" is once again coming to life, 1968 and 1993 briefly seem to be one.
Onstage, three African-American singers bump and grind their way through "White Boys," while director Michael Bogdanov monitors every Supreme-like shimmy. On this occasion, the performers only mime the song's celebrated lyrics — "my daddy warns me stay away / I say come on out and play-ay-ay-y" — so they can save their voices for that night's preview.
Minutes later, the cast of 26 scans the empty Old Vic Theater with flashlights, as they will do to the audience during each performance.
"It's sinister, very, very sinister," Bogdanov said of the moment.
And offstage, the two men behind Broad-
way's legendary tribal rock musical — coauthor James Rado and composer Galt McDermot — look on in wonder, amazed that a '60s cultural touchstone is finding new life a quarter century later.
"It's nuts, totally nuts," said McDermot, whose silver hair and L.L. Bean jacket suggest an aging golfer, not a begetter of the best-known counterculture musical ever.
The show's third originator, co-writer Gerome Ragni, died in 1991.
Rado said, "It feels like we're in Hollywood here, like we're working on a big-time movie. There are 150 people working in this theater every day."
This new "Hair" is a $3.08 million co-production between Canada's David Mirvish, owner of the Old Vic, and real-estate tycoon Abe Hirschfeld, who made waves in New York earlier this year when he attempted to buy the bankrupt New York Post.
The show opened Sept. 14 in the 970-seat
theater. The cast includes American actor Paul Hipp, Australian heartthrob Felice Arena and pop singers Sinitta and Pepsi Lawrie Demacque. John Barrowman, born in Scotland but raised in the United States, plays the pivotal role of the doomed Claude.
If this is the biggest "Hair," it is also in some ways the riskiest.
After all, "Hair" in 1968 was as much a celebration of free love as a musical — a simultaneously festive and fearless piece whose pro-drugs, anti-war message was inseparable from the decade that gave it life.
Or was it?
"Hair' isn't just for the '60s," argues Bogdanov, 54, who was in the audience at the 1968 London opening night and witnessed the famous full frontal nudity first-act ending. "It's not just for the '90s; it's for the future. Without that, I wouldn't have been able to do it."
the question, then, is whether "Hair" is
resilient enough to withstand AIDS, the passing of the Reagan-Bush era and such renewed atrocities as the war in Bosnia.
"The fact that this is an anti-Vietnam War piece doesn't invalidate it in terms of any other war raging in the world," Bogdanov said. "In that sense, it's like any play taken out of its time and used to exemplify something happening in the world."
The director spoke of a poignance in the failure of the vision prescribed in the show to come to any kind of realization.
"The sad thing is that 25 years on, the world is in an even worse state than it was then — the pollution, the juggernauts, the wars," he said. "I feel that pathos very strongly."
Said McDermot: "There was really a very big reaction against the values of 'Hair' in the '70s as soon as Nixon came in; now people are beginning to think they can look at it again."
Cambodian a music success after struggle to survive
The Associated Press
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Ell Bunna had to hang up his guitar 18 years ago or risk execution. Now, after surviving the brutalities of government, he's back as one of Cambodia's most popular songwriters.
Ell had been a rising star when the radical Khmer Rouge took over in 1975.
Before Cambodia was plunged into almost four years of disastrous economic schemes and draconian social reforms, he seemed destined for fame. He had a few hit tunes covered by some of the country's best known singers.
But then the Khmer Rouge banned popular music, along with all musical instruments. The only tunes Cambodians could listen to were ear-piercing revolutionary songs.
Ell was forced to hide his past lest the Khmer Rouge target him for having practiced what it considered a bourgeois profession.
Simple survival remained his priority even after a 1978 Vietnamese invasion overthrew the Khmer Rouge, which left behind a shattered society and the corpses of hundreds of thousands of people it had starved, tortured
and worked to death.
But in 1800, Ell spotted a stranger with a guitar that somehow had survived the Khmer Rouge's anti-bourgeois campaign.
The instrument was battered, its wood chipped, its strings broken.
He bought it for a precious 22 pounds of rice — enough to feed him and his wife for a week — and replaced the broken strings with a bicycle's brake cable.
"A whole new world opened to me when I played the guitar again," the 46-year-old Ell said. "I had given up my music and only prayed to survive."
Two years ago, he built a studio in his apartment building, soundproofing the room with wood, layers of cloth and straw mats.
Now he and other musicians record cassettes there, mixing traditional Cambodian sounds with those of the West.
His songs once again get played on the radio, in shops, even on film soundtracks.
"During the Khmer Rouge time I never expected that I would live long enough to write songs again," Ell said. "At least before dying I can leave something for Cambodian children."