Chicago Reader36%
Kokandy’s Hair connects the 60s to the present 5%
By Kerry Reid39%
7/23/2026, 9:03:37 AM
Topics: Theater Review
BS Summary: This article contains 8 faulty reasoning types, including Pessimism Bias, Horn Effect, and Hasty Generalization, with Availability Heuristic as the most egregious example at 6% saturation with 64 hits. Analysis detected 377 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,065 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 15.1% and a BS Rank of 5% (24,325 of 25,473 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 95.50% of the article peer group.
Nearly 60 years after its off-Broadway premiere, Hair (featuring book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado and music by Galt MacDermot) remains one of the most enduring artifacts of the yippie/hippie era.
Even if you’ve never seen the “tribal love-rock musical” onstage or in the 1979 film version directed by Miloš Forman, songs like “Let the Sunshine In” and “Good Morning, Starshine” have probably wormed their way into your ears from time to time.
At the time it was first staged, Hair’s frank depictions of sex, nudity, drugs, and other counterculture shibboleths (including, of course, the protests against the Vietnam war and the draft) marked a turning point in musical theater history.
Hair
Through 9/13: Thu–Sat 7 PM, Sun 5 PM; Chopin Theatre, 1543 W.
Division, kokandyproductions.com, $55.20 general admission, $65.87 reserved, $44.52 students/seniors
Now the problem with staging the show is how to dust off the hippie-dippie cobwebs without removing it too much from the cultural milieu in which it was birthed.
For the most part, Kokandy Productions’s current revival, directed and choreographed by Brennan Urbi, manages the task.
This isn’t the sunshiniest version you’ll ever see, but these aren’t sunny times, and pretending that the Age of Aquarius is still at hand would be grotesque in this moment.
Urbi’s staging turns the Chopin Theatre mainstage into an in-the-round, near-immersive experience.
When we enter, a set of crude wooden bleachers faces both the playing area and the usual seating in the auditorium, but other bleachers and chairs around the stage put the story of a group of New York youths searching for peace, love, and understanding right in our laps.
Curiously, before the show opens, there’s a platform at the center of the stage with an armchair, lamp, and an old record player, which momentarily made me wonder if we were going to get a framing device lifted from The Drowsy Chaperone—perhaps with an aged Berger reminiscing about the band of friends and lovers (and sometimes both) at the center of Hair.
That’s not the case, though I do kinda think it would be an interesting approach.
(Eleanor Kahn designed the clever and flexible scenic environment.)
Instead, Urbi’s cast of young and highly energetic performers bridges the show’s time and our own through anachronistic use of signs on issues relevant to our own fucked-up era (Stop ICE, Free Palestine, etc.).
Audiences are handed markers at intermission and encouraged to write their own graffiti on the wooden bleachers.
That makes some sense, especially since we’re engaged in another quagmire of a foreign conflict in Iran.
But at least nobody’s being drafted—yet.
Yet the elements of the show’s own time are clearly present in the vibrant costumes by Rachel Sypniewski, makeup by Syd Genco, and wig and hair design by Keith Ryan.
It’s also present in most of the performances.
The show doesn’t shy away from the less savory elements, particularly in Zac Richey’s Berger, the swaggering trickster still hung up on a 16-year-old (never-seen Donna) who also treats Sheila (Catherine Rodriguez O’Connor), an NYU student and activist who lives with Berger and Claude (Gavin Rhys) with callow indifference from time to time.
Pregnant Jeanie (Nicki Rossi), who carries a torch for Claude (who is not the father of her baby), sums up some of the romantic confusion: “I’m hung up on Claude, Sheila’s hung up on Berger, Berger is hung up everywhere.
Claude is hung up on a cross over Sheila and Berger.
”
It’s a succinct reminder that a lot of the counterculture was still about young people as confused about love, sex, and commitment as people before them had been.
Tossing out the rule book doesn’t mean that people are going to lose their hang-ups and longings overnight.
Rhys’s Claude faces the biggest existential crisis when his draft card shows up (represented here by a red card with a garish picture of Uncle Sam dangling from the ceiling).
His performance subtly but effectively captures the persona of a guy who isn’t at all sure about what the right thing to do is, and who is beginning to realize that playtime is gonna be over, one way or another, for himself and his comrades.
The tricky part of Hair for me is figuring out how much the characters represent political rebellion and how much they represent libertinism for its own sake.
The two can be linked, but it’s easy to imagine that Richey’s Berger, for example, who has more than a whiff of self-interest about him, could eventually take the Jerry Rubin path to Wall Street.
(His attitudes toward women would fit right in with a lot of corporate offices, honestly.)
And we all know that marketing rebellion is as American as apple pie, which is one reason Hair became a hit in the first place.
Tom Morello and Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s Revolution(s) at the Goodman last year took a grimmer look at the long-term effects of living for the cause.
Hair was never meant to be that, and I’m not sure all of Urbi’s attempts to tie the musical’s time into our own age of dystopia work.
But that doesn’t mean the attempt isn’t worth it.
Especially given the talent on tap here.
The somewhat cavernous space and the brick walls in the Chopin mainstage make some of the lyrics a little hard to hear in the group numbers (though Kara Olander’s music direction and the six piece-band is strong throughout).
The songs for the women characters come across particularly well.
In addition to Rossi and O’Connor, Amy Yesom Kim as Crissy and Chosen Mitchell as Dionne are standouts.
(Jeanie, Crissy, and Dionne singing “Air” hit particularly hard during a week when Chicago had the worst air quality in the nation.
“Welcome, sulfur dioxide.
Hello, carbon monoxide.”)
The nude scene that was so controversial all those years ago is gone, probably as a sign that mere nudity no longer shocks us.
The ending is also darker than I’ve seen in previous productions.
Kokandy’s production doesn’t offer a 60s theme park take on this material.
They’re not trafficking in nostalgia for its own sake, which is a blessing.
Ultimately, despite some awkwardly self-conscious moments here and there—and what youth rebellion isn’t about self-consciousness, in all fairness—Kokandy’s Hair elevates the best moments of the material without allowing the more dated ones to overstay their welcome.
Analysis
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