Hippie dream

By and large, I try to keep the night job out of this column. I love musicals, and even derive a gruesome gallows pleasure from the really bad ones but, since I review them for the Telegraph, it feels wrong to write about them here. And I don’t often listen to cast recordings of great shows at home either. If I want to hear numbers from the great American songbook — and I often do — I prefer the interpretations of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Fred Astaire, the last a man who sang as well as he danced, and always served the song rather than his own ego. An exception, however, must be made for the current production of Hair, now playing in the West End with the same American cast who first opened this glorious revival on Broadway.

For an old hippie like me, who saw the original London production in 1968 at the age of 13, this celebration of the flower power dream, and the darkness that shadows it, belongs in the canon of classic musicals.