The hippie movement. Free love. Counter culture. Psychedelic drugs. Protests. Disarmament. Paisley. Hair is the rock musical bringing all of this to the stage with its menagerie of long-haired hippies, now returning with its Summer of Love rock anthems for its fiftieth anniversary tour.

Hair is a series of tangentially related scenes and musical numbers with the barest hint of a story to string these elements together. It is much more focussed on its tone and the introduction of wacky characters than anything approaching a functional plot. Think Cats, with the cats replaced by hippies.

And now the sucker-punch: my god, Hair is a broken musical. This is nothing to do with any specific production but rather the muddled monstrosity this show was conceived as. At its core, Hair is a compromised sell-out. It claims to venerate the counter cultural era of the ‘60s yet all it really does is repackage the aesthetic and music of the period as a sanitised product, shipping it out to audiences disengaged with the issues that the hippie movement stood for. You can tell because there is no substantive material on what the hippies were rebelling against: the Vietnam War and the draft are these nebulous concepts paid lip service too, nothing more.

By sanding off all the hard political edges, all that is left is the easily parodied ‘groovy’ attitudes and half-baked drug-inflected spiritualism. Rather than truly celebrating anything, Hair renders its subjects as indolent hedonists. The attitudes of the show are fundamentally crypto-conservative. The counter culture is treated as an indulgent curiosity that will ultimately capitulate. Its adherents are gently mocked, and the values of the Establishment seep through at various points. Look no further than the awkward racial stereotypes suffusing the tripping sequence in the second half, or the subordinated roles of the female members of ‘the Tribe’.

Now, one might claim that there is a point being made that is going over my head. That one can legitimately criticise the hippie movement for preaching rebellion but all too frequently recreating the power dynamics and attitudes of the Establishment within their own communities. This is a fair point in general, but Hair lacks the chops to be making such a nuanced point. It doesn’t have a point at all. Even without my harping on its ideological contradiction, the show is all over the place. Rather than committing to a plotted musical or a full-fledged staged concert, Hair occupies a hazy middle-ground. It presents characters and their dynamics, but these go nowhere and only serve to fill time between the musical numbers. It is more frustrating than if Hair were entirely plot-free because it gestures towards a story, creating expectation but never delivering a pay-off.

All of that does not, for the record, diminish the talent of the performers. The tunes are veritably belted out and everyone on stage is dedicated to selling the theme and atmosphere of sensuous drug-fuelled revelry. Hair is a bright and brazen extravaganza, make no mistake. But these efforts are towards a fundamentally flawed end. No amount of dedication can surmount that the show is vacuous and unstructured.

I can only recommend to those who want a shallow trippy musical spectacle. It will suffice for that, at least. But for anyone else, Hair will frustrate and infuriate.    ★★☆☆☆    Fenton Coulthurst   3^rd April 2019