MIAGRAFF: Why Hair now? SUSANNA GELLERT: When I first programmed Hair, I programmed it for how fun it is and how incredible the music is. The music in particular has become a real classic that we all grew up knowing. It has become a part of our American DNA. This year, as we are still emerging from the pandemic, I wanted to have a show that brought people together from different generations and different points of view. Because Hair is known as such a musical of the sixties and about all of the movements of that time, it felt like a good reminder of how we as a country have gone through hard times before and have gotten through them. As I started working on directing it and as the world kept doing what the world is doing right now, I found that it was even more timely and relevant than I thought it would be when I was first programming it. It has really become a story of how young people and people of different generations need to come together to have conversations that are difficult in order to figure out where we as a country go next. It has been really surprising to all of us how this happy, fun musical is so much about where we all are as Americans today. MG: Hair is not traditionally performed with actors playing their own instruments. Why did you decide to have actor-musicians in the show? SG: When I was working on Ring of Fire last year, I discovered how exciting it is when actors are also playing
their own music. We don’t do this the entire show, but we do it multiple times throughout. We decided to go in this direction because the singer- songwriter and the
rockstar was such a figure of the 60s, and it felt so right for a re-exploration of Hair now to have artists creating their own material. I wanted to see what happens when Berger and Claude are their own rockstars.
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