Cross-Training Body Mind Emotions Spirit | Rachael R. Resch

Just as it says in the song from “Hair,” at dawn on February 14, the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars — all in the sign of Aquarius.  In honor of that planetary configuration and in honor of the play “Hair,” we danced to the entire original soundtrack of the Broadway musical.

Interestingly, a number of songs in “Hair” borrow from Shakespeare, the master eloquencer and metabolizer of grief into beauty.

Most well known is the stunningly beautiful and heartbreaking song, “What A Piece of Work Is Man,” sung by Ronnie Dyson and Walter Michael Harris, composed by Galt McDermott.  

It comes entirely from Hamlet’s speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (although the order of his speech is changed slightly in the song), when Hamlet realizes these two “excellent good friends” are actually spies.  

During this sing, according to “Hair” historian Doris J. Brook, the company lies dead on the ground following the war scene that occurs during the song, “3-5-0-0” (a song which borrows from the great contemporary poet, Allen Ginsberg’s “Wicheta Vortex Sutra”), and the two singers step over and around all the bodies.

Here is Hamlet’s speech:

I have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth . . .
this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory;
this most excellent canopy, the air, look you,
this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof
fretted with golden fire, why it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel! 
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals!

— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark  Act II, Scene II

Both the speech and the song go straight to the heart of the tragic dialectical grief of the human situation:  the beauty, intelligence and great creativity of humans on one hand, and our cultural and individual dissociation from the great tapestry we call life on Earth, of which we are intrinsically a part, both biologically and spiritually.  

The grief, as Martín Prechtel teaches, that precisely because of our profound interconnectedness, the mere fact of living, even in a subsistence  economy, is a continual sacrifice of all our relations: the foods we eat, the waters and fires we enslave, the earth we mine, not to mention the wars we wage.

This grief emerges again in the final song in “Hair, “The Flesh Failures/Let The Sunshine In.”  The hero, Claude, according to Ms. Brook, stands behind the company in his army uniform, shorn of his hair.  They can’t see him.  (He also may be dead; some believe that he is a Christ figure.)  When he then sings slowly, “Manchester, England, England,” the group responds by singing Romeo’s words, ending with, “The rest is silence” from Hamlet, which is the last thing Hamlet says as he is dying.

Here’s Romeo’s speech to the apparently dead Juliet.  

Eyes, look your last!
Arms, take your last! embrace! and, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss.

— Romeo and Juliet  Act 5, Scene 3

Our grief is our love.  And love is our hope.  The music of “Hair” is a phenomenal example of, as Martín Prechtel teaches, turning the inherent grief of the situation — be it Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan or our own precious lives — into beauty in order to metabolize it and offer something to feed not only our own spirits but the Holy.