'Hair' restoration

But even though none of the actors in Arizona Theatre Company's new revival was around during the '60s, they don't see the show as just an exercise in Baby Boomer nostalgia. To them, America in 2008 looks much like it did 40 years ago. The nation is divided by war, both real and cultural, but also buoyed by a new hope for change.

"We don't have to invent any of that," says Morgan James, the New York actress playing Sheila, chief political activist in the "tribe" of hash-smoking free-loving draft-dodging hippies.

Raised by a pair of hippies herself, James says she inherited the peacenik values embodied by Hair.

"When I go into those protest scenes, it's not a stretch," she says. "It's very much a part of my heart."

Arizona Theatre Company is pulling out all the stops for a production they expect to be one of their biggest hits in years. Artistic director David Ira Goldstein flew to New York to cast the show and made sure to hire top talent behind the scenes, including Abe Jacob, the "godfather of sound design" - who worked on the original Broadway show 40 years ago.

In the beginning . . .

Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical was created by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, two actors with one foot in the counterculture and one in the mainstream. Rado had originated the role of Richard Lionheart in The Lion in Winter on Broadway, but he knew Ragni from the experimental-theater scene, where they starred together in an off-Broadway musical protesting capital punishment.

Although they cast themselves in the starring roles of Claude and Berger - two points in the bisexual love triangle at the heart of the play - they weren't genuine hippies, already being (gasp!) older than 30. But they believed in the hippie message of peace and love, a message that they thought was being distorted by the establishment media.

"We were writing about the moment, we were writing about the war," says Rado, who has had a hand in several Hair revivals over the years. "We were putting onstage what was so emotional and powerful out on the streets. We wanted to extend that message and that feeling to audiences."

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