Why venture off campus for a raging good time when sex, drugs and rock and roll come to our very own Edison Theatre? The Performing Arts Department, under the direction of Jeffery Matthews, has brought the unique style, dancing and singing of “Hair: The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical” back onto the stage and into our hearts, just as it did for the generation of 1968.

The set, lighting, costumes and entire atmosphere are superb. From the get-go the mood is set and the audience is brought back to a time of flower-children, peace, love and really good trips. The extremely clever set design places the band above the stage-right where it belongs in the center of the action. Meanwhile, the clever and catchy music of “Hair” makes even the most depressed dance home singing, “Let the sun shine in!”

The production features several stellar performances. Junior Carolina Reiter as Sheila, a peace advocate and tribe protest leader, does a particularly fine job. Her songs “Easy to be Hard” and “Good Morning Starshine” are executed beautifully. Another highlight is a surprisingly spectacular cameo performance by freshman Jake Levine-Sisson as Margaret Mead. With dead-on comic timing and a phenomenal voice, we can count on seeing a lot more of this talented newcomer.

The fact that the entire cast is on stage for almost every musical number fills the theatre with a vivacious energy that makes it hard to not get sucked in. A long hallucination sequence, complete with strobe lights, lots of smoke and visits from Scarlet O’Hara and Abe Lincoln, among others, is extremely entertaining. Like any opening night performance, a few first-run jitters were in the air, and some trouble with mikes probably didn’t help, but the show can only get smoother, more finely tuned, and better with each night.

When “Hair” opened on Broadway, it was fit for its times, and it intended to shake things up. Since then, the times have not changed too much. Although some of the references in “Hair” are specific to the decade-for example, did you know that Timothy Leary was a campaigner for psychedelic drug use?-the effect on the audience is as profound as ever. Opening night nicely (if not boldly) coincided with Parents Weekend, and the generation before us is likely to catch many more of the meaningful references that might have gone over the heads of a younger crowd.

A production with so much depth cannot be summed up in a single word, but if there is something writer Gerome Ragni explored with “Hair,” it is a timeless search for freedom, probably best exemplified by the song “Walking in Space.”

Despite its apparent vulgarity and sexual frankness, there is something truly poetic about the musical. It shows that the human hunger for transcendence is as voracious as ever. By the end of the show it did not make much of a difference if every single allusion had not been recognized or every joke laughed at. The show’s success, after all, does not depend on such recognition. Instead, success is found in the show’s sentimentality-in the overwhelming rush of emotion that occurs in the final scene and in the cast members’ vibes that cannot help but leak out into the audience.

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