Hair was famous for its nudity. How does the musical do it in 2024? -

On the very day of “Hair’s” Broadway opening on April 29, 1968, police were called to Columbia University’s campus to violently quell student antiwar riots. Seven hundred students were arrested.

“Hair” was already a cultural riot of its own, with news swirling that the young cast would get naked at the end of Act I. “Several healthy young men facing front and center in the altogether,” as the New York Times described it the day before opening. The scene ended with actors playing police threatening to arrest the entire audience for viewing the obscenity.

Well, Columbia exploded again last month, just as a new “Hair” opened at Signature Theatre in Arlington. Resonance abounds. Things are different now. But they’re also the same.

“Come see the penises!” is how William Goldman satirically summarized “Hair’s” original advertising campaign in “The Season,” his book about that year in theater. “There were also some bare boobs around, but this is the twentieth century, and bare boobs are nothing nowadays. But a penis! Suddenly you knew what art was all about.”

That original nude scene was quick, dimly lit, with no motion allowed due to local decency laws. Everyone got undressed under a giant piece of cloth and emerged through a slit. Productions since have varied from no nudity at all to Broadway’s 2009 revival going full-cast, full-on.

“Hair” at Signature stages the moment with smoke and shadow onstage and a bright, semi-blinding light on the audience, with a couple of extra measures like themed stickers to put over your phone’s camera, if you wish, and a reminder from ushers that the show is for our eyes only.

What’s especially different from 1968 is the offstage work that got everyone to that moment. We’re now in the era of theatrical intimacy directors.

“It was really my conversations with Chelsea Pace that made me feel the nudity was imperative in telling the story,” says director and Signature Artistic Director Matthew Gardiner. Pace, the theater’s resident intimacy director, explains now: “The nude moment in ‘Hair’ is about protest. It is about rejecting the expectations of society. It is about putting yourself, your body on the line. It’s not about a bunch of sexy naked people.”

In the paradoxical world of theatrical intimacy, deciding the show needs nudity meant telling the actors that they absolutely did not need to be naked.

How does that work? Consent, choice and power dynamics.

“My purpose in the [rehearsal] room is sometimes misunderstood as being there to help the actors be comfortable,” says Pace. “In reality, a lot of the work we do is theater-worthy because it isn’t comfortable. I start by saying discomfort is really welcome, we just have to find a discomfort that’s sustainable for you.”

Pace worked on another production of “Hair” where she was brought in two weeks into the rehearsal process. “That show was adamant, everybody had to be naked,” she says. “And they had not made that explicit in the casting process. I think they thought I would give them a magic word that would make everybody [willing to] take their clothes off.”

If there is such a word, Pace says she does not know it. So Signature’s process started with the auditions. “We said there is not the expectation, but the possibility of nudity,” director Gardiner says.

That took pressure off the actors, he says. “What’s interesting is a lot of the actors who said ‘under no circumstance will I do nudity,’ after being around Chelsea and these other artists, and feeling a certain level of comfort and safety and feeling that they understood what the intention behind the moment was? A lot of the actors now do do the nudity.”

So there’s something like a magic process. Here’s the crux: Every night, “every single member of the cast has an alternative option,” Pace says. “Even the ones who say they want to do the nudity every night.”

The actors back in the day also had a choice whether to disrobe. Famously, Diane Keaton, who performed in the show at age 22, didn’t see the point of baring all, and didn’t. But there was enough cast disgruntlement about the nudity that management threatened to recast the show with strippers, according to “Hair: The Story of the Show that Defined a Generation” by Eric Grode. Eventually, they settled on giving actors an extra $1.50 per show to take it all off — that’s $13.57 today.

Signature’s “Hair” is more thoughtful about it. Assistant stage manager and unofficial robe czar Julia Singer is in charge of the moment after the nudity. “The actors feel very free in that moment,” she says, but getting them off the stage in the dark has to be very regimented — same order, same speed every night, to preclude bumping.

“The crew has their electronics off,” she says. “We know which actors want robes set out and which want them handed to them.” The backstage TV monitors — which help performers follow the show and see the conductor — are all turned off to avoid any unnecessary light.

Some productions of “Hair” use a “modesty garment,” flesh-toned underwear designed to look invisible. But this one rejected that idea, Pace says: “We would rather it look like people are still wearing their pants or underwear rather than being fake naked.” The latter would have “felt like we were making it more about nudity, whereas people not getting all the way undressed still felt like it was a moment of protest.”

Mason Reeves, who plays the effervescent hippie Berger, likens the nudity to learning to do a backflip, which he did last year. It’s something you start out afraid to do, and you can’t do it without overcoming a mental block. You can’t do it without doing it.

The first few rehearsals of the scene, he kept his underwear on. “That primal reaction — oh, I have to get out of here, I don’t want this,” he describes it. “Letting that go? It was nice getting to practice what I do in my own life — there are plenty of times we have to do things that are scary or uncomfortable. It was lovely working through that.”

And now, he takes it all off every night (so far — the show runs until July 7). He doesn’t notice anyone else’s body around him. “It’s me, taking a deep breath every time I take a piece of clothing off and feeling that sensation internally and then just letting it emanate out and glow outward.” It’s hard to imagine anything Hairier than that.

Nora Palka plays Jeanie, a pregnant flower child. “Hair” was her dream show, but when Keegan Theatre did it in 2014, she didn’t audition because of the nudity. Seeing how fleeting it was in that production of “Hair” assuaged her fears. So now, in this show?

“I’ve been going full on, every single night, much to my surprise,” says Palka, laughing. “I’m front and center, because I want to be. It’s the only chance the audience gets to know I’m actually pregnant. People come up to me, so moved by that. I guess because pregnant people have faced discrimination or pushback for being pregnant in the workplace, or the theater.”

This is another difference from 1968. The show’s creators, Gerome Ragni, Galt MacDermot and James Rado, changed the character of Jeanie when actor Sally Eaton got pregnant. But she told the New York Times, about taking her clothes off: “I’d love to, but I haven’t been asked. I suppose it might be too much like the National Geographic.”

Not anymore. On opening night, Palka looked out at the audience during the big naked moment, and saw her father. She’d invited him, but actually looking at his face right then must have taken guts of steel. “His eyes were shut and he was looking off to the side, and he looked like he had eaten something sour.”

The show’s original producer Joseph Papp said the best audience for the show might be the parents of hippies, so they can try to understand their kids.

“If my mom comes, I might leave my underwear on just for her,” says Reeves. “Then again, I might do whatever I want.” But it’s a bit of a special case, as Reeves’s mom is pursuing a master’s in directing and actually uses Chelsea Pace’s book “Staging Sex” as a text.

“She’s been geeking out,” he says, that her son is working with Pace — the woman who convinced her son to get fully nude onstage. In 2024, “Hair” truly is a show that brings families together.

If you go

Hair

Signature Theatre, 4200 Campbell Ave., Arlington. sigtheatre.org.

Dates: Through July 7.

Prices: $40-$135.

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