The New Broadway Cast Recording - Hair (The New Broadway Cast Recording)
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Free Music Notes for Hair (The New Broadway Cast Recording)
Free Music Review: Hair-Cut
Hit: 3 Stars
This was a show I doubted would ever be revived since it was so specific to a time and attitude. Well, this is not so much a revival as a reconstruction. What had been raw and immediate has been reimagined and turned into the perfect "period" Broadway musical. The edge is gone. It might as well be "No, No, Nanette" or "Me and My Girl."Free Music Review: Not as good as in person
Hit: 3 Stars
I saw the Broadway show from which this CD has been made and loved both the show and the music. While the recording is fun, it does not have even a little of the energy and spark that the score conveyed in person. Disappointing in comparison.Free Music Review: Give this "Hair" the Brush
Hit: 2 Stars
This CD of the Broadway revival of "Hair" is crisply recorded, energetically sung by an enthusiastic cast and smoothly supported by a first-rate band. So why are the results so utterly abysmal? Well, for starters, "Hair" has to have one of the worst, most amateurish scores ever written. There are perhaps four or five memorable songs, but the rest is made up of scraps of things that rarely last beyond two minutes. Vamps, chanted choruses and pastiche parodies don't add up to much. And the lyrics are some of the clumsiest concoctions ever heard on Broadway. "Singing...our space songs on a spider web...sitar...life flows around you and in you...answer for Timothy Leary...deary." Huh? Lyricists James Rado and Gerome Ragni must have been enjoying acid trip #364 when they came up with that lulu. Throw in the knee jerk mockeries of the "Hail Mary" and the Constitution (shorthand at the time for showing you were "with it") and it becomes clear that these guys aren't songwriters; they're hacks.
The cast members try but the problem is, they try too hard. The vocal mugging and gosh-darn earnest euphoria is so over-the-top they sound like they just came off the bus-and-truck tour of "Godspell". Everyone has a terminal case of the cutes. Even though they're singing about hashish, LSD, war and various sexual activities, they sound about as threatening and subversive as the Partridge Family. Will Swenson as Berger is the chief offender. His vocal affectations and attention-seeking swagger are relentlessly overbearing in a show-offy way. After a while, I forgot he was supposed to be playing a hippy...I thought he was the reincarnation of Sammy Davis Jr. Brutal. Gavin Creel is less offensive as Claude, but his reedy, wan tenor is a slight instrument that never registers. The only ones who come out unscathed are Sasha Allen, who does just fine with her stirring rendition of "Aquarius", and Cassie Levy, who brings a simple gracefulness to "Easy to Be Hard" and "Good Morning Starshine". The energy-soaked "Hair" survives nearly unscathed as a hippy-dippy anthem. Of course, it's hard to completely botch this song since it's such a euphoric upper, but Will Swenson's overkill almost succeeds in doing just that (can someone please make sure his Ritalin is replenished...SOON).
Unfortunately, the few glimmers of hope are surrounded by so much pushy theatricality that listening to this CD becomes an ordeal. Somebody forgot to inform the singers that they don't need to hit the back row of the balcony on a cast recording. Easy to be hard? For this bunch, it's apparently "hard to be easy".
Free Music Review: This Hair is limp
Hit: 2 Stars
Keep your original cast recording of Hair from 1968; this one is bleach-damaged. Despite some improved sonics, the singing is universally less powerful than the original, the arrangements surprisingly spare and uninspired, and the male leads are woefully ... unmasculine. It's a great disappointment.
Perhaps the most egregious error is having the weakest female singer of the lot doing two of the best songs: "Easy To Be Hard" and "Good Morning Starshine." What a missed opportunity. The original Broadway and movie versions were much better.
I can't speak to how these interpretations played in the revival of the show on stage, but I was looking forward to a new, revitalized soundtrack, and this is simply a bummer trip.
Free Music Review: Doesn't do it for me
Hit: 2 Stars
I came of age during the 1960s and 70s. To this day the soundtrack of Hair plays in my head from time to time, and it has a certain sound - robust, edgy, energetic, and raw. I agree 100% with the reviewer who prefers to remember the original, when the clothes were not costumes, and this was not a period piece. The 2009 version feels like a group of Juillard-educated musicians bringing popular music to the upper crust. If you like this edition, at least also treat yourself to the original.