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Decades Later, Hair Still Swings

Critics love 'exuberant' revival

By Matt Cantor, Newser Staff

Posted Apr 1, 2009 11:00 AM CDT

(Newser) – Bursting with energy, the Broadway revival of Hair, recently moved indoors from Central Park, has wowed critics—though there are a few gripes. What they had to say:

“Hair, for all its references to hippies, Vietnam, free love and the revolution, feels utterly of the moment in its exuberance, its power to involve and, in Diane Paulus’s entrancing production, to move us,” writes Jeremy Gerard for Bloomberg.

The show maintains an illusion “of rawness and immediacy, an un-self-conscious sense of the most self-conscious chapter in a person’s life,” writes Ben Brantley in the New York Times.
In Newsday, Linda Winer lauds the revival for finding “a modern pulse of fury and hope without betraying the specifics of a period piece about Vietnam and all flavors of liberation," but notes that "more often than we'd like to admit,” it “looks a bit like a flower-power commercial for air freshener.”

[Videos (1)]

The marquis for the Broadway musical "Hair" is shown at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, in New York, on Thursday, March 5, 2009. (AP Photo/Peter Kramer)

Sasha Allen, center, and the cast of the upcoming Broadway production of "Hair" perform "Aquarius" on the first day of rehearsal, Friday, Jan. 30, 2009, in New York. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

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The cast rehearses "Aquarius." (wrkin9to5)

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Decades Later, Hair Still Swings

Critics love 'exuberant' revival