​To this day, I remember every play that I attended with my mother at the Lakewood Summer Theater, the theater at Bowdoin College, the Shakespearian Theater in Monmouth, Maine. Parenthetically, theater played an important roll in my Mom’s life. As a student at the University of Maine, she acted in many Maine Masque plays, and she continued to attend many plays until she died in 2003. Consequently, ever week during the summer, we saw many wonderful plays at the aforementioned theaters. To name just a few, I saw “Auntie Mame,” “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” “The Sound of Music,” “Godspell,” “MyFair Lady,” “Count Dracula,” “Fidler on the Rood,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” “Shenandoah,” and “Hair.” It was hugely enjoyable. All of the plays were great performances, and there were many others. The combined chemistry and charm of live theater is always outstanding, and I particularly loved the graceful setting of the Lakewood Theater in Madison, Maine. 

​It was at Lakewood that I saw the critically acclaimed “Hair,” a legendary play. Although it debuted in 1967, in an off-Broadway theater, it would achieve heroic theater acclaim when it appeared on Broadway in 1968. It was a play of rare order due to its revolutionary feeling, outstanding music, and thematic directness. The play raised the consciousness of audience, and the various messages are still relevant today. I can still see myself staring at all the nude bodies at the conclusion of the first-act of “Hair,” and I am sitting next to my mother. Wow. As I recall, we were in the second or third row, and I absorbed the moment, and it was a beautiful, sincere theatrical moment, but with motherly assurance she had forewarned me and explained the symbolic meaning of it; which, indeed, the meaning reached me with absorbing, attentive authority. In image and sound, they were enriching musicals of a different era, and who can ever forget the emotional power of some of the songs in each o them: “Easy to be Hard,” “Aquarius,” “Good Morning Starshine,” “Where do I Go,” and “Let the Sun Shine In.” The songs worked in the play, and they still have driving emotional force today: timeless.
 
What was extraordinary was discovering, just this past week, that our Omega Mu brother, Andrew M, Wiswell, ’27, won a Grammy Award as the producer of the original cast album of “Hair” in 1968, and that he was nominated for the Grammy Award five additional times. 

​Andrew’s success continued as a producer of the Broadway musical albums with “The Music Man,” “Hello, Dolly,” “Kismet,” “Coco,” “Purlie,” “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd,” and “I do! I do!”

​Fraternally,
Chip Chapman, ’82
Perge!