Diane Paulus: A Broadway Dream Comes True at Hair
For director Diane Paulus, the best thing about the success of her Broadway revival of Hair is watching audience members of all ages joyfully leap onstage at the end of the show to boogie with the lively and talented young cast she assembled almost two years ago for a series of concerts in Central Park. As she notes in her essay, almost all of them are still with the show, which has settled in at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. Paulus, whose credits include the off-Broadway hit The Donkey Show as well as opera and theater productions around the world, is a busy lady these days: In addition to Hair, she’s artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre on the campus of her alma mater, Harvard, and is the mom of two preschool-age daughters. Here, she explains her lifelong obsession with Hair.
When I got a call from the Public Theater in the spring of 2007 asking me to direct the 40th anniversary concert of Hair in Central Park, I almost dropped the telephone. The people at the Public couldn’t have known it, but Hair is my favorite musical of all time. I was just a baby in the late '60s—and I grew up feeling like I had missed “my” decade. I memorized the cast album of Hair and read the liner notes again and again; I had fantasies about what an incredible journey the creation of this musical must have been in its time.
So, I loved Hair—but I had never seen it. I asked the Public for a script, and the first version they sent me was a paperback book with the script from the 1967 off-Broadway production, which was very different from what the show became when it transferred to Broadway the following year. Then I read the Broadway script, followed by several other versions that book writer/lyricist Jim Rado gave me that have been performed over the years. I joke that it’s the many “folios” of Hair.
Luckily for me, Jim was eager to rethink and reshape the book. For example, young people today barely know what a draft card is, so we added an explanation of the serious consequences young men faced if they burned their draft cards. We trimmed at least 30 minutes from the show and crafted a version of Hair especially for this revival.
I had only nine days to get ready for the concert production back in 2007, but I told the Public upfront that there were several things that had to be done. First, we had to assemble the right cast. This couldn’t be a case of pulling in Broadway “ringers” just to get the show up quickly. I wanted to do a full, comprehensive casting search because Hair, even in concert, works only if you have a believable Tribe onstage. We needed singers who could really deliver the songs, which didn’t necessarily translate into performers with the most experience or technical proficiency. Composer Galt MacDermot was at my side at every audition, and he would say, “Nice voice, but it didn’t move me.” We were looking for performers who made us believe they were singing the songs from deep within their hearts and souls.
My second requirement involved living up to the show’s title: I felt that you couldn’t do a concert version of Hair without great hair and costumes, because so much of the show is about how the belief system of these characters is expressed through their individuality, including how they wore their hair and how they dressed. Finally, I said, “We have to do the nudity. We’ve gotta go there.”
One can look back now and think, “It was crazy to try to do all that in nine days,” but the intensity of that first experience set the tone that has continued through our journey to Broadway. There was no time for anything but diving into the material head-first—no time for egos or complacency. Everyone had to give themselves over to something greater than themselves—to the power of bringing this show alive for audiences who were already camping out in the park to see it. The bonds we formed from that experience were deep: Two years later, 22 out of 26 members of the original cast are still with the show. The tribe was born.
From the beginning, I had a wonderful collaboration with choreographer Karole Armitage, who, like me, was a Hair fanatic. She totally understood when I said, “There is no such thing as unison movement in Hair.” She got that it needed to feel organic and alive and free and individual. And I had a great team of collaborators around me: Scott Pask on sets, Michael McDonald on costumes, music director Nadia DiGiallonardo, Acme Sound Partners, and now lighting designer Kevin Adams on Broadway, who have been devoted to the show and what it stands for.
Of course, the greatest privilege has been working with Jim and Galt to bring Hair to a new generation. I can honestly say that when we started this journey, it was never about ending up on Broadway. Truly, my thought was, “Here’s an incredible piece of theater that needs to be done now, and if we take it to Broadway, we will have the opportunity to bring the message of this show to a larger audience.” At the Hirschfeld, there are three generations of audience coming together at Hair—the people who remember seeing the show the first time round and who lived the 60s, people my age who were too young to have seen the show back in 1968 but know all the music, and finally, teenagers who are discovering Hair for the first time as if it were a show that had been written for them yesterday.
When I see those hundreds of people dancing together at the end of the show at the Hirschfeld, it is a tribute to the power of Hair to bring people together. Making my Broadway debut with this show is a “pinch-me” dream come true.