Naples Illustrated

Art Scene

Taking Summer Stock

More theaters in Southwest Florida extend their seasons into summer.

BY SARAH FK COBLE

Summer of Love

There was a Texan in the White House, a controversial election on the horizon and Americans were ambivalent and weary of a foreign war they didn’t completely understand. An actor was governor of California, where thousands wearing hip-hugging jeans and tie-dye shirts converged for a summer of rock music, psychedelic drugs and free love. That was 40 years ago. Or was it? This June, Naples’ TheatreZone presents Hair, the pioneering rock musical that encapsulated the spirit of those times even as it holds a mirror up to our own.

“I’m hesitant to draw any parallels between that time and this, but I find it interesting to see how it will all play out. And you do start to wonder if we ever learn from our history,” says Mark Danni, artistic director of TheatreZone. “The further you get away from it, the more it loses its initial sting and hits a historic chord. It’s more than a ‘hippie’ thing—it’s a glimpse into the mindset of the time on issues like racism, sex and drugs.”

Struggling actors and writers Gerome Ragni and James Rado wrote Hair in 1967, ushering in the Aquarian Age with groundbreaking music and a controversial story that shocked with its racially integrated cast and themes that challenged cultural and social norms. As a musician, Danni was on the 25th Anniversary Tour of 1993, the revival production directed by Rado with music supervised by Galt MacDermot, the composer of the classic score that includes “Aquarius,” and “Let the Sunshine In.”

“Oh, it’s hard to tell what you were thinking 40 years ago,” says MacDermot, who still composes and performs. “I was from Montreal—I didn’t know anything about Broadway. I was playing piano for rock ’n’ roll recording studios and they said they wanted a rock ’n’ roll score. I thought I’d just do what I was doing—you know, writing pop songs, getting down a groove, versus writing for ‘a show.’”

MacDermot was in his 30s when he became the “love-rock musicologist” of Hair. The clean-cut son of a Canadian diplomat, while living in South Africa, willfully ignored that country’s stringent apartheid to study indigenous music played by workers of the gold mines near Johannesburg.

It’s this collective experience that Danni wants to bring to bear to TheatreZone’s production of the distinctive Broadway treasure. “I was born in 1966, but that era has always just hit a nerve with me, and working on the 25th anniversary tour was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in my life,” Danni says.