Hair

IN PRAISE OF FOLLICLE Creel, left, and Swenson let it all hang out.

Thought they were safely quarantined in Central Park? The hippies have taken over the Hirschfeld. And you can bet those shaggy-headed, draft-dodging, free-loving naturists will be squatting on West 45th Street for quite some time. The Public Theater’s raucous, joyous revival of the Hair has returned in triumph, and attendance will surely lead to a collective contact high.

If anything, the transfer indoors produces more heat than last summer in the open-air Delacorte. The walls fairly shudder with Galt MacDermot’s polymorphously perverse rock score, and the stage gets a thorough pounding from the cast’s nonstop dancing, stomping and sprawling. Directed with tireless inventiveness and intensity by Diane Paulus and groovily choreographed by Karole Armitage, Hair speaks to a new generation faced with unpopular wars and a cynical society.

The 32-strong cast is rife with talent. Will Swenson radiates bad-boy charisma and impossible physical rigor as Berger. The lovable Gavin Creel makes for a superb Claude; his all-American good looks and sweet tenor fit the existentially troubled youth for whom burning his draft card isn’t an option. Darius Nichols is suitably loose and glowering as the black hipppie Hud, and Sasha Allen lifts the roof with the opening salvo, “Aquarius.”

Make no mistake: The 2009 Hair is a commercial enterprise, hence the audience-friendly dance party that ends the evening and the overall feel-good rock-concert vibe. But Paulus doesn’t abandon the Vietnam-era sourness; for all the show’s sassy hedonism, the final tableau is of soldier boy Claude, hair shorn and dead for his country. No flashbacks here.—David Cote

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