Thin, even with highlights

Some hope! Daniel Kramer's coarse-grained revival of Hair misses the opportunity for intimate focus in a minute auditorium. It is projected as if for a West End stage and audience, thanks to a vigorous, four-strong band and frantic choreography.

The production's style, broad, loud and unsubtle, at odds with the beautiful, soft-rock melancholia of much of Galt MacDermot's music, ensures the orgiastic love-in looks grossly simulated. The scene proves typical.

Now history is written off as dead and youth only remembers last year's mobile, Kramer has tried to doll-up Hair with a modish snazzy perm and new highlights. Yet for those who remember the longtressed, rebellious original musical, with book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, Kramer's touched-up version will seem a case of alopecia, all new-wave opportunities lost, too much predictable, old-fashioned dandruff visible.

Rado/Ragni mounted a fierce critique of America's Vietnam war, through the prism of 1960s flower-power kids and hippy peaceniks.Those gorgeous songs captured that exhilirating Sixties atmosphere of cultural and political rebellion.

No wonder Britain's theatre censors, in their last gasp of power in 1968, banned Hair, condemning it for wielding the cultural terrorist weapon of antipatriotism with "dirty language, free-love, homosexuality, drug-taking and anti-Establishment views" in full flow. Mr Blair would have sympathised.

Kramer's tame updating lacks subversive political vigour. The Vietnam war becomes Bush's Iraq disaster. The President and Condoleeza Rice, not to mention Oprah Winfrey, are sent up as silly caricatures in stylised hair-pieces.

References to Prozac and a character tastessly tatooed with the initials H IV VIP contribute to the non-specific mood. The flower-power is all faded. Gayness, of which there was just a discreet dash in the original, is given its head in mechanical fashion.

Charles Aitken's ash-blonde Claude, who soldiers in Iraq and ends up in a coffin, wears a look and a voice of dopey bemusement. He commutes between heterosexuality and gay propositions in the shape of Kevin Wathen's swaggering, well-sung Berger.

The cast, as if over-powered on speed, willy dance and sing around a stage decorated by a meaningless curtain. Yet the overwhelming pathos and appeal of those songs, right down to the ironically hopeful Let the Sunshine in, left me emotional and moist-eyed once again. How even this thin Hair gets to me!

Until 8 October. Information: 020 7229 0706.

Hair