Television: Hairzapoppin’

When Hair, America’s first tribal love-rock musical, opened two years ago, t was thought by many to be merely a passing fancy. Not so. Now it is a case of Hair, there and everywhere. So prolific has the show become, in fact, that t is difficult to find a spot in the world where Hair isn’t sprouting.

There are permanent companies in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Berlin, Paris, Sydney, and—get this—Belgrade. And all with four-letter words and the nude scene solidly intact. The show is currently playing in Las Vegas (where the cast was threatned with arrest for, of all things, indecent exposure; but when the guffaws echoed from both coasts, the proposed arrest was canceled). Toronto, Boston, Helsinki and São Paulo will get their Hair next year, and rights have been sold in Israel, Italy and Belgium.

All this hairsplitting is not without its dangers, though. The Mexican company ran one night in Acapulco before the authorities moved in to close the show for “undermining the morals of youth” and put the cast in the local cárcel for five hours. By coincidence or something, the date of the Mexico opening was the only one that was not determined by the company astrologer. All other openings have been determined by the stars and planets, and all were financial successes. Even history could not stand in the way of Astrologer Marya Crumere’s choice of this week’s opening date in Japan—Dec. 7.

The original cast album of Hair has sold nearly 3,000,000 copies, and the score has been recorded for various national posterities in Swedish, Spanish, French, German and Japanese. Back home, everyone from Andy Williams to the 5th Dimension has a Hair tune on his album. And the producers have opened bidding for the movie rights, now up to $2.5 million. Which just goes to show that, for American tribal love-rock musicals at least, this is most assuredly the Age of Aquarius. And bread, man.