Despite his misgivings, Taubman did note Hair's vitality, which reminded him of The Grand Street Follies, a popular 1920s revue named for the fancy Lower East Side boulevard that my wife and I abandoned for the evening. Moreover, the eminent reviewer did like the talented cast, and correctly foresaw that the play's score would "shape up as an authentic voice of the popular culture of 1967."
Taubman's reservations meant nothing to Tom O'Horgan, the groundbreaking director who revamped the musical for Broadway. Blithely ignoring the reviewer's critique, O'Horgan proceeded to significantly ramp up the vulgarity and the sex, and in a controversial new twist to Act I, introduced a mass display of bare breasts alongside an assortment of other appendages otherwise safely packed away.
The fuss surrounding the nudity on stage was considerable. The Times reported that Belgian actress and sex symbol Monique Van Vooren had announced her bold intention to attend opening night in a completely transparent chiffon blouse.-
How disappointed she must have been when Vogue magazine rendered her appearance anticlimactic by "endors(ing) the nipple as a high fashion accessory".
Sitting beside some eleven year old who had no business being there, and with Berger's assault dissolving into the atonal intro to 'Aquarius', I was oddly overcome by a tangential squall of images from my own experience of the hippie era: a frayed silhouette of my grandmother reading the Yiddish newspaper at our kitchen table on Manhattan's West End Avenue; the pleasant aroma wafting from my dad's pipe in his law office on Columbus Circle.
Random childhood impressions followed, of a Manhattan far grittier and more threatening, yet refreshingly free of blackberries and laptops, internets and MP3 players.
During intermission, we encountered Frank Lautenberg, the eminent US Senator from across the Hudson. "Isn't this a lot of fun?" enthused the octogenarian legislator.
With my left hand resting a wee too-familiarly on his shoulder and a hi-ball gripped in my right, I nodded exultantly. And then, amid the grins, drinks and chitchat, my eyes fixed on the senator's very impressive silvery pompadour -- at a venue, I remembered, dedicated wholly to the celebration of the human mane in all its forms.
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