Photo: Michal Daniel
Soaking Wet Hippies, Audience Dance Together at ‘Hair’ Premiere
It’s a bold move, staging an outdoor production of a musical that ends with the song “Let the Sunshine In,” when summer thunderstorms are a constant threat. At last night’s opening of Hair at the Delacorte — in a moment that seemed too poetic not to have been planned — the deluge came just as the chorus began. Inspired by watching two-plus hours of hippie dancing and groping, the soaking wet audience poured down from the seats and joined the party onstage, perhaps hoping everyone would get naked as they do at the end of the first act. Harvey Fierstein, though, was unimpressed. “Oh, honey. Been there, done that,” he said when we asked him how he felt about staged nudity. “In 1972 I was in a show called Satyricon at La MaMa and we were all naked. I bent over with a jewel in my anus — that’s back when we were young and had muscle control. We had a big orgy scene where we wore glow-in-the-dark penises and vaginas, but what we did was we took them off and held them up in the air while we actually had sex onstage. I don’t know how you can get more naked than that.” —Jada Yuan
Soaking Wet Hippies, Audience Dance Together at ‘Hair’ Premiere