Hairy Monsters
Hair performed by Theatre Komedija at the Pula Film Festival
Review by Rada Djurica

At the 2003 Pula Film Festival, celebrating its 50th birthday, film screenings took place at the ancient Vespasian's Amphitheater (a Roman Empire coliseum). The amphitheater, popularly called the Arena, is a beautiful place, lit by moonshine and starlight on summer nights. Many people nostalgically recall impatiently waiting for screenings of the newest films or for big concerts and big theatre plays. Part of the 50-year anniversary of the film festival was a production of the musical Hair. You can not imagine what is it like to have such ancient arena full of people. It is truly magnificent!

So why Hair to finalize the Pula Film Festival, you might wonder? There might be great symbolism, considering what Hair is set in the United States in the '60s. At that time the U.S. Army was sending its youth to someone else's war, to fight in Vietnam. History repeats itself -- Vietnam, Bosnia, Kosovo -- the message is still the same. Let the sun shine in; make love, not war!

In the 1960s, there was, without a doubt, a division between pop culture, pop music, and rock 'n' roll on the one hand and the more conventional musicals that dominated Broadway on the other.

The version of Hair performed by Theatre Komedija from Zagreb in Croatia is, indeed, very similar to the original. Some songs, though, are translated into Croatian. Their production picks up on the spectacle of the original. Creativity went into the details, but everything else is the same.

In the 1960s, few mainstream musicals inspired people to move the show into the streets and onto the college campuses of America. In 1968 Hair officially became the "American Tribal Love-Rock Musical."

Hair broke a lot of Broadway rules: The music was neither jazz-based, nor in the operetta tradition. It was pure, psychedelic rock: mad, electric, driving.

The characters were neither historical, mythological, nor noble. They were young hippies, outcasts, draft dodgers, and marijuana smokers.

Songs about smoking pot and dropping LSD, songs about sex, free love, the Vietnam War, racism and nuclear power evoked a spectrum of raging emotions in audiences, from outrage to enthusiasm.

James Rado and Gerome Ragni wrote the book and lyrics, and Galt MacDermot wrote the distinctive rock music. At that time, the play had several unique qualities. The first is the music by Mr. MacDermot, which is rocking and swingy, if not terribly original. There was a rough, tough, lusty quality to the music that went a bit too far in compensating for its commerciality.

The other unique quality was simply the honesty of its cast.

Today, of course, all this is past. There is nothing new here, but memories of our parents in their youth. Today's youth are not hippies but ravers who also smoke drugs and prefer Ecstasy over LSD.

The message of free love and sex today becomes a twisted and more sarcastic version, with a new danger in "the city of Babylon," AIDS.

The actors protest, laugh, fight, love, and rebel, spilling across the stage with sprawling arrogance. Everybody, including audience, seems to believe totally in what they are doing, which is always wonderful to see in the theater. Sharp and to the point: dancing, singing, swinging, the open stage becomes their arena for protest, and the entire arena a reason for protest. And although today's reality is different from the reality of the musical, the idea offered here is enough to make the audience uncomfortably aware of just how far away today might be.

Galt MacDermont is the son of a Canadian diplomat with a traditional background in music. His Hair music is cleverly calculated provocation, a protest against the establishment but crafted to gain commercial success. At the end of the '60s, this was clever. But what does it mean today, in Croatia, after the latest civil war? A nostalgic treat for people, to look back on the past, rather than daring to look to the future: the future of music, musicals, theatre, art, politics, everything. For people with enough disappointments, when the fight against the governmental establishment is an old story, the play is repeated many times. In the USA, this is a completely different story. For the USA, playing Hair over and over is just gaining commercial success on old graveyards. But for Croatia, playing Hair is getting back to the bright-lit past of the '60s and '70s, old Yugoslavia.

Maybe Hair, performed by the Croatian Theatre Komedija, is today's equivalent to those off-Broadway revues of four decades ago, when a generation of gifted musicians and actors proclaimed their arrival. There are, of course, significant differences in style, but there's also the similarity of new voices expressing themselves.

But how about originality? How about looking into the future? How about using electronics and computers? How about video performance and the mishmash of the Twenty-first Century, with the same message as the 1960s musical Hair?

Watch out, hairy monsters of the Arena, there might be just enough hair for one festival!