Tony Mastroianni Review Collection
Longer "Hair" set here
Cleveland Press March 17, 1971
Curiosity not only kills cats, It sells tickets to "Hair."
The five-week run of the controversial rock musical at the Hanna has been extended another three weeks, through Sunday, May 2. Tickets will go on sale next week, not now.
Cleveland has proved to be much like other cities where "Hair" has played so far as audiences are concerned.
This may be a youth show but more than half the audiences are well past 30, many of them pushing 60. And it is an anti-establishment show but very much an establishment audience.
Maybe no one else but the establishment has $15 for a pair of tickets.
A psychologist's probing of this audience phenomenon might be interesting. Is it masochism that lures a pro-establishment audience into an anti-establishment spectacle?
Is it a form of hair shirt and ashes?
Do some parents feel that, this is a shortcut to understanding their bewildering offspring?
I READ with interest the calm (and some not so calm analyses) of the show's message that come from older and sometimes wiser heads. Do they really get all that from this over-loud and over-sexed but not very well done production?
It is obvious the "Hair" participants are protesting and it is equally obvious, what they are protesting. (There is little against which they do not protest.) But they do not protest well, only indiscriminately.
It is entirely possible to be opposed to the war and not like "Hair.' Unfortunately there are many people whose purchase of a ticket to "Hair" is about all they are ever likely to do about war, poverty and pollution.
