Raven-Symone rocked a slim new figure at the People's Choice Awards -- and she said the weight loss pretty much happened naturally.

The onetime star of Disney's "That's So Raven," now 25, found herself "not stressing" as much once her show's run ended a while back.

Not that she was stressing over how she looked when she was heavier.

"I thought I looked fabulous before and nobody else did," she told People on Wednesday night. "So, whatever."

That's hot.

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-- Christie D'Zurilla

Left photo: Raven-Symone at the People's Choice Awards on Wednesday. Credits: Valerie Macon / AFP / Getty Images

Right photo: The actress in 2008, shortly after "That's So Raven" wrapped up. Credit Axel Koester / For The Times

A drunk driver held responsible for a crash that killed a San Diego County sheriff's deputy was sentenced Friday to seven years and eight months in prison.

Jose Lopez Jasso, 34, was driving the wrong-way on Highway 52 in Santee in the early hours of Feb. 28 when Deputy Ken Collier made a U-turn to give chase, prosecutors said.

As Collier came within 20 yards of Jasso's vehicle, his patrol SUV hit a freeway abutment, rolled down a hill and burst into flames. He died at a local hospital of his injuries.

Collier, 39, a graduate of San Diego State, joined the department in 2001 and became a patrol deputy in 2006.

In October, Jasso pleaded guilty in San Diego County Superior Court to gross vehicular manslaughter, drunk driving that caused great bodily injury and driving the wrong way.

"While today's sentencing does bring some measure of solace, it cannot bring back our deputy and friend, Ken Collier," said Sheriff Bill Gore. "Sheriff's Department employees will never forget his sense of humor and dedication to his job."

-- Tony Perry in San Diego

Photo: Sheriff's Deputy Ken Collier

Credit: San Diego County Sheriff's Department

As I've noted in the past, I think Pixar's "Toy Story 3" is easily one of the best films of 2010, but its chances of winning an Oscar for best picture this year are about as good (and I say this as a die-hard Chicago Cubs fan) as the Cubs winning the World Series. It just ain't gonna happen -- not as long as most of the motion picture academy seems to view family-oriented animation films as lightweight fare.

So even though Disney has spent more millions than ever touting the film's Oscar pedigree, it's really, really throwing good money after bad. The film is pretty much a shoo-in to make one of the 10 best picture slots, but the odds are re-aaaaa-lly long when it comes to its chances of winning a statuette outside of the animation category. But what I don't get is why Disney spent even more moola swaddling Thursday's Envelope section with what is known in Hollywood marketing parlance as a "belly band," a wraparound sleeve featuring a picture of Buzz Lightyear carrying Jessie and adorned with another blurb singing the praises of the film.

The belly band wasn't such a bad idea. But since Disney has been going around everywhere pronouncing the film as the best-reviewed movie of the year, couldn't it have used a more serious critic to wax eloquent on the ad than Scott Mantz from "Access Hollywood"? Inside the Envelope issue, the studio ran a two-page ad with blurbs from all sorts of critical heavyweights, including my colleague Kenny Turan, the Wall Street Journal's Joe Morgenstern, Time's Richard Corliss and the New York Times' A.O. Scott. Why not feature one of their plaudits instead?

As it turns out, according to veteran awards-season wizard Tony Angellotti, who's helping run the Disney Oscar campaign this year, the studio used Mantz because--gasp!--he was one of the few critics who expressly gave props to the film's director, Lee Unkrich, and its writer, Michael Arndt. Disney has been trying to raise their profile to help give them a boost in their own quest for academy recognition. As Angellotti told me: "As you yourself stated in a previous story, animated feature filmmakers are too often overlooked by the media for their remarkable contributions. Thus, we wanted to underscore these filmmakers individually." 

Fair enough. But I go to "Access Hollywood" for celebrity sightings, not cinematic perspective. If Disney really wants "Toy Story 3" and its filmmaking team to be taken seriously, it should find a critic from a serious publication to sing their praises.

--Patrick Goldstein

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Photo: Jessie, left, with Buzz Lightyear and Woody in a scene from "Toy Story 3."   Credit: Disney/Pixar

No more "Mother" and "Father" for the Obama administration's State Department.

The department has announced that it is replacing the traditional parental designations on its passport applications (see above) with the more contemporaneously correct "Parent One" and "Parent Two."

This takes effect when new forms come out Feb. 1.

This might sound like some kind of psychotic cyber society eliminating family distinctions in favor of PC federal bureaucratic numbers. However, the State Department denies that this change is Democratic political correctness ignoring some obvious biological realities and distinctions. "Hello, Parent One? This is Child Three calling."

The State Department calls the changes "improvements," saying they're intended to provide "a gender neutral description of a child's parents" and to recognize "different types of families." A spokeswoman said the new terms "recognize changes in medical science and reproductive technology."

Regardless, the official federal change at the halfway point of Barack Obama's presidential term is delighting gay rights groups.

Deleting the customary "mother" and "father" terminology, says Jennifer Chrisler of the Family Equality Council, "allows many different types of families to be able to go and apply for a passport for their child without feeling like the government doesn’t recognize their family.” Chrisler's group has long lobbied for the changes.

Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council disagrees, you'll not be surprised to learn. "Only in the topsy-turvy world of left-wing political correctness could it be considered an ‘improvement’ for a birth-related document to provide less information about the circumstances of that birth,” he told Fox Radio.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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The Modern Language Assn. is holding its annual conference in Los Angeles -- during the first week of January, for the first time in many years, rather than between Christmas and New Year's. Professors and post-graduate students of English and the humanities are milling around the L.A. Convention Center, the plaza at L.A. Live and the conference rooms at the J.W. Marriott. The real business of MLA may be the quiet, secluded semi-finalist interviews for the highly prized tenure track positions at universities all over the country, but like most other conferences, MLA also has an exhibition floor, panel discussions and presentations.

Those presentations have a unique flavor. Because scholars with PhDs are often highly specialized, and at this conference they're speaking to others with an equal level of scholarship, the presentations tend to have titles that can be a bit, um, esoteric. Here's a list of some we didn't attand:

Bootleg Paratextuality and Aesthetics: Decay and Distortion in the "Borat" DVD

Nature Is a Petrified Magic City: The Poetic Unity of the Organic and Inorganic in "Heinrich von Ofterdingen"

Loving the Love of Silence: Material Silence in High Medieval Monastic Books

The War of "Of" and Other Polyvocal Syntaxes in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"

The Paradigms of Paradox and Sarcasm in the Prinadellion Grotesque

The Transgressive Sublime: (Post)Modernism and (Post)Colonialism in E. M. Forster's "A Passage to India"

Murdered Modernism: Peretz Markisha and the Legacy of the Soviet Yiddish Avant-Garde

Novels as Advertisements and the Production of "Surfer Girl Localisms" Across California and Mexico

Shakespeare and Us: Presentism, Historicism, and Pedagogy

Metonymic Machines: Books and Literary Histories

Readable Urine, Murky Muck: Excrement and Interpretability in Medieval Italian Texts

Vital(ity) Economies: Indian Surrogacy and U.S. Middle-Class Dependence on Employable Mothers

Rethinking Stylistic Pedagogy: Imitation, Sentence Combining, and Generative Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century

The most surprisingly topical paper of the conference may have been "Was Huck Finn ... Afro-Oriental? Locating American Indian Law and Epic in Twain's Slavery Novel" -- there's no way its author could have predicted the recent outrage over an expurgated version of Twain's book.

And local hero the Museum of Jurassic Technology is getting some attention during MLA. On Saturday, it will be the focus of a panel with several scholars, described as: "This session explores recent currents of theoretical inquiry regarding L.A.'s Museum of Jurassic Technology, including cultural ventriloquism and hybridity, the immediacy of knowledge in an era of ubiquitous computing, the practice of 'shop gifting,' the establishment of a middlebrow exegesis, the purposeful cultivation of discomfort and unease amongst museum visitors, and employing aesthetic cannibalism as a strategy of camp." Conference attendees who are daunted by the panel description might want to just drive across town and visit the museum itself.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: MLA 2011 program. Credit: Carolyn Kellogg

RECENT AND RELATED: The Expurgated Huckleberry Finn

The role of the all-American ingénue turned New York diva comes naturally to Sutton Foster. “I was the girl in those songs,” the Tony-winning star said Thursday during her cabaret performance at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, after singing a medley of tunes from three of her Broadway performances: "Thoroughly Modern Millie," "Annie" and "Little Women."

Foster has a practical, self-deprecating demeanor and the big voice and long arms of a stage queen -- or at least a Princess Fiona, her last star turn (in "Shrek: The Musical"). 

Foster’s best when she’s playful about her prodigious talent and homespun beauty. She romped through “I Don’t Want To Show Off,” from "The Drowsy Chaperone," with goofball charm, ripping falsies out of her dress (then retrieving them from an audience member). In perhaps a Samueli first, she displayed her pair of “Pimp” and “Ho” goblets. Making fun of the genre she does best, she held up her “Big Book of Really High Belt Songs.”

The problem is, those really high belt songs play better in a big room. On the otherwise moving “My Heart Was Set on You,” Foster’s voice rattled the small space with sharp, metallic tones.

When Megan McGinnis came out mid-set, the "Little Women" costar’s softer, higher voice brought out the warm, low tones from Foster; their duet of “Flight” transported the room.

Accompanied by pianist and musical director Michael Rafter, Foster sang show tunes and pop songs. The difference between a stage star versus a singer-songwriter in concert is not so much that you’re not sure if she’s acting, but that she’s Acting. During “Once Upon a Time,” as Foster gazed longingly into the middle distance, I kept wanting to turn around and see what was climbing up the Samueli’s back wall.

Foster’s debut OCPAC performances had been rescheduled so that she can star in the spring Broadway revival of "Anything Goes."  Foster has little to prove to Broadway lovers, yet she’s far from a household name (though she has been a Jeopardy question). If she plays to her Ethel Merman qualities -- her comic timing and brassy verve -- she could not only nail Reno Sweeney but perhaps clinch her signature role, ultimate American sweetheart.

-- Evelyn McDonnell

Sutton Foster, Samueli Theater, Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Dr., Costa Mesa. Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m., Sunday at 7 p.m. $74 Contact: 714-556-2787 or OCPAC.org

Photo: Foster at the Samueli theater Thursday night. Credit: Glenn Koenig/Los Angeles Times

For the record column published Jan. 7

Report an error. More corrections.

Jane Krakowski, the "30 Rock" star who's engaged to Psycho Bunny designer Robert Godley, is pregnant.

Krakowski, 42, revealed her new shape on a beach in the Caribbean on Thursday, walking in the surf in a one-piece swimsuit.

The London-born designer -- Ralph Lauren brought him to New York in 2004 -- has been with the actress since 2008. They got engaged in January.

Krakowski's rep confirmed the news to TVGuide.com on Friday, saying: "Both soon-to-be first-time parents could not be happier."

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-- Christie D'Zurilla

Photo: Designer Robert Godley and actress Jane Krakowski at charity event in New York on Nov. 9, 2009. Credit: Stephen Lovekin / Getty Images.

With Major League Soccer's Galaxy acting more and more like a minor league outfit by refusing any comment whatsoever, the vaunted David Beckham-to-Tottenham Hotspur story refuses to go away.

On Friday evening, Spurs Coach Harry Redknapp made it sound as if a deal was all but signed, sealed and delivered to have Beckham loaned to the London club for a couple of months at least.

"There is a good chance we will get David Beckham," Redknapp said. "It's just a case of sorting out the length of the loan and one or two other bits and pieces. Our secretary told me this morning it's going to happen."

But Beckham's former coach in the English Premier League, Manchester United's Alex Ferguson, told the Guardian that he finds the idea laughable.

"Obviously, anyone at 35 is looking at the twilight years of his career," Ferguson said. "I have players at United like Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Gary Neville who grew up with David and are at the same level. They know they are coming towards the end of their careers and the horrible part of being a manager is seeing that. These players are eventually going to retire. David knows that better than anyone."

But Redknapp isn't buying it. The thought of adding Beckham to an already talent-laden roster has him drooling.

"He's not a punch-drunk heavyweight champion who's washed up and skint," Redknapp said. "This is a boy who's in the prime of life. I think he would give the other players a lift and he can definitely deliver a ball. It's no good having Peter Crouch if you can't get the ball to him in the air. Beckham has the ability to do that."

The Guardian reported that "advanced talks" were underway between Spurs and Beckham, and that Tottenham had already cleared room on its roster by loaning midfielder David Bentley, the backup to Aaron Lennon in Beckham's right midfield position, to Birmingham City until May. 

Meanwhile, nothing but silence has come from the Galaxy's side of the table. But then, of course, what else is to be expected when it's the tail that's wagging the dog?

Beckham is pulling the strings and Galaxy Coach Bruce Arena and company are the puppets.

Sell him and be done with it. The circus has gone on too long.

--Grahame L. Jones

Photo: Galaxy star David Beckham takes in the Lakers-Pistons game on Tuesday at Staples Center. Credit: Jae C. Hong / Associated Press

A little more than two months after it bounced commentator Juan Williams, NPR this week forced out Ellen Weiss, the news executive who let Williams go.

Neither departure makes a lot of sense. Williams had to go, we are told, because his opinions were too opinionated. NPR ethics guidelines prohibit employees, even ones hired as analysts, from giving personal opinions.

Weiss got pushed toward resignation for exuberantly enforcing that no-opinion policy. We are told she had to go, not because the Williams termination was wrong, but because it was executed too hastily.

That seems like a lot of personnel movement in response to very little actual harm, at a news organization that is otherwise gaining in credibility and audience size.

The outcome has left just about everyone unhappy and brought a heap of unwanted attention to NPR, just as Republicans in Congress are looking for places to slash the federal budget.

As I wrote in my On the Media column, I think the radio network delivers a solid product that usually refutes charges of liberal bias. But I also suggested it may be time for a new kind of affirmative action, to assure more conservative representation on NPR’s news staff.

If NPR has a great defense of the Williams or Weiss terminations, the network's executives are not making it this week. A review by the law firm Weil Gotshal & Manges was supposed to provide some clarity.

But that review was meant to inform the board of directors. Any chance the public will ever see it is  virtually nonexistent. It does not even exist in written form, according to a report on NPR's website. Even if there was a Weil document, not many employers want to rush private personnel matters into public view.

That leaves a lot of unanswered questions:  Was Williams really warned on multiple previous occasions about letting his personal views hang out in public? How many times was he put on notice, and how did he respond?

As to Weiss, who worked at NPR her entire adult life: Did she really get in such hot water for merely moving Williams out too quickly? NPR chief executive Vivian Schiller approved the Williams axing, so doesn’t that mean Weiss was not ultimately responsible for the firing? Or is there something more?

Williams has landed on his feet. His previous part-time employer, Fox News, immediately gave him a full-time job as an analyst and a three-year contract reportedly valued at $2 million. In several appearances on the cable outlet Thursday, he went about bashing NPR as an unreformed liberal monolith. He cheered Weiss’ departure.

In an interview shortly after her resignation this week, Weiss told me she had no idea what her next job would be. She declined to say anything about Williams, 56.

A mixture of reactions flashed through the radio network's Washington headquarters. Several employees told me how much they admired Weiss, 51. They called the senior vice president for news the glue that held the operation together. Others pictured her as a divisive figure who played favorites.

Some NPR employees questioned whether she had paid her dues working as a producer in the studio rather than in the field as a reporter.

Adam Davidson, co-founder of “Planet Money,” the award-winning financial program, described Weiss as a strong leader with a great eye for news and ear for storytelling.

“She knows the intricacies of how things get done in the public radio world. She knows the craft of radio really well,” said Davidson. “She knows how to put together a great narrative. And then, on top of that, she has that big, broad vision of where things need to go in the larger media landscape. I’m not saying you can’t replace her, but she had an incredibly unique set of skills.”

--James Rainey

Twitter: latimesrainey

Photo: Ellen Weiss resigned this week as senior vice president for news at NPR, following a critical report about the firing last year of commentator Juan Williams. Weiss spent nearly 29 years at the radio network. Credit: NPR

On the heels of a late-December PBS broadcast of this season’s Los Angeles Philharmonic opening night gala, “Celebración”; an hour-long special on Gustavo Dudamel hosted by Tavis Smiley;  the Berlin Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve concert conducted by Dudamel (and currently on view at www.medici.tv); and the Dude’s comfortable chitchat with Jay Leno on the "Tonight Show" Tuesday night, the Los Angeles Philharmonic started the year in Walt Disney Concert Hall Thursday keen to capitalize on the moment.

The program, when repeated Sunday afternoon, will be the first of its controversial "LA Phil Live" simulcasts in movie theaters from shore to shore. It will launch the orchestra’s first European tour with Dudamel later this month. And since everyone can’t fit into four Disney concerts, be accommodated by 400 U.S. and Canadian screens or make it to a few big-deal concert halls on the continent, the program is also being recorded for the L.A. Phil’s next iTunes download.

Once more, the Dudamel Express has audaciously -– recklessly? -- left the station.

Halfway through his second season as the orchestra’s music director, Dudamel is still new, and thus far nearly everything he conducts here, he does so for the first time. That was true Thursday, but the two works of the first half -– John Adams’ “Slonimsky’s Earbox” and Leonard Bernstein’s First Symphony (“Jeremiah”) –- were also Dudamel firsts. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the concluding work, has, however, long been in his blood. It and Beethoven’s Fifth, recorded with the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra four years ago, comprised Dudamel’s first CD.

The L.A. Phil’s first performance of Adams’ 13-minute splashy curtain-raiser was conducted by the composer in 1997, two years after it was written. The following season, Esa-Pekka Salonen took the piece on tour in Europe. For this year’s tour, it will be the closest the orchestra gets to hometown music.

Adams is the L.A. Phil creative chair and Nicolas Slonimsky -- the Russian conductor, musical encylopedist, writer, theorist, teacher, wit –- lived much of his long life in Los Angeles (he died in 1995 at 101) and had various associations with the L.A. Phil. He also paved the "Tonight Show" way for Dudamel as a guest of Johnny Carson, playing Chopin on the piano with an orange.

Adams captured Slonimsky’s antic side in a twitchy score full of minimalist tricks and sudden splashes of unexpected beauty. Dudamel made the score dance, sparkle and shimmer, polishing rough edges and glorying in that surprising beauty.

Bernstein’s “Jeremiah” Symphony also had its first L.A. Phil performance led by the composer. A wartime score from 1942, written at 24, it has an oracular first movement (“Prophecy”), a breezy Scherzo (“Profanation”) with a Broadway center, and an aching final movement with a text from “Lamentations” sung in Hebrew by a mezzo soprano. It is, already, all Bernstein.

Dudamel’s performance was slower and grander than the three Bernstein recorded (in 1945, 1961 and 1977). All are around 25 minutes; Dudamel used up nearly half an hour. When Bernstein conducted “Jeremiah” with the L.A. Phil at the Hollywood Bowl in 1983, he seemed angry and uncertain how to recapture his youth. In 1987, he conducted it again at the Bowl, this time with the Vienna Philharmonic and seeming resigned -- a sad and philosophical musical god questioning a higher deity.

Dudamel’s Bernstein is that of a youth (Dudamel turns 30 Jan. 26) taking up where an old man left off. Sometimes that works. The sound he got from the orchestra was big, bold and fabulous, but I think he asked too much of the music. Kelley O’Connor was the robust soloist, although not a word of her Hebrew was intelligible.

Give him a few years, though. Four years ago, Dudamel’s Beethoven Seventh was an exciting, unpredictable rollercoaster ride. Now every phrase speaks with added life; momentum matters more. Before his Seventh was moment to moment, body or soul.  Now it is body and soul, all one. The orchestra played as if on fire, accentuating syncopations in the feverish Finale as if it were a Cuban salsa.

Will this play in Peoria, Ill., (at the Willow Knolls 14 Sunday ) or on the road in Old-World capitals such as Budapest or Vienna?  We’ll find out. But let me salute the L.A. audience. Disney was packed Thursday, the crowd diverse. Quiet, alert and alive during the Beethoven, listeners jumped up with audible joy at the end. If that response can be exported, this orchestra will really be in business.

-- Mark Swed

Gustavo Dudamel conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday. $44-$167. (323) 850-2000 or www.laphil.com.

Photo: Above, Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Concert Hall Thursday night; below, mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor. Credit: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times.

 
Las Vegas the fashion capital of the West? When it comes to shopping, it may just be. All through the recession, luxury brands have continued to pour money into the $28.2-billion retail market, adding to what was already a smorgasbord of high-end offerings.

Lanvin, Tom Ford, Donna Karan and Reed Krakoff all opened stores in Las Vegas in 2010, banking on exposure to the city’s nearly 40 million annual visitors. Other brands such as Louis Vuitton and Prada built new, supersized boutiques, adding to the number of outlets they already have here.

The assortment of merchandise in Las Vegas is sophisticated, even avant garde at certain boutiques. And customer service can be over the top. You’re likely to get an enthusiastic “Hello!” before you’ve stepped 5 feet into a luxury store, even if you happen to be toting a yard of strawberry daiquiri.

To read more of my story about the luxe shopping scene in Las Vegas, click here.

-- Booth Moore

Photo: View of the Crystals shopping center at City Center in Las Vegas. Ricardo DeAratanha/Los Angeles Times.

If the National Anthem at Cotton Bowl 2011 sounded a little familiar, well, you just might be watching a little too much college football. Little Big Town, the country group that delivered four-part harmony Friday night, had warmed up for the Cotton Bowl by singing that same tune for the Orange Bowl on Monday.

The Stanford Cardinal took the trophy at the Orange Bowl, giving Virginia Tech a 40-12 walloping to put an exclamation mark on the end of the Pac-10 era as we know it. Cotton Bowl 2011, in Arlington, Texas, is pitting the No. 11 LSU Tigers (Geaux!) against the No. 17 Aggies (Do we see a 12th man?) from Texas A&M.

Little Big Town, together since 1998, includes husband and wife -- and new parents -- Jimi Westbrook and Karen Fairchild, Kimberly Schlapman and Philip Sweet (the latter two married outside the group).

Check out video of Little Big Town at the Orange Bowl, above, and let us know if you like them enough to hear them do it twice.

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-- Christie D'Zurilla

Baby boomers just started turning 65, which means more and more ex-hippies will be added to the rolls of Social Security. But if you think time has rendered “Hair” old-fashioned, you need to check out Diane Paulus’ exhilarating revival, which opened Thursday at the Pantages Theatre.

This Tony-winning production understands the musical’s strength, which has less to do with a well-wrought story and snappy show tunes than with the Dionysian expression of a community struggling to liberate itself from oppressive convention. The experience comes as close to “the American Tribal Love-Rock-Musical” subtitle as one can get without worrying about a raid from the LAPD.
 
From its off-Broadway inception in 1967, “Hair” has wrestled against charges of kitsch.  A few long-haired types detected something ersatz in the countercultural approximations of Galt MacDermot’s music and Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s book and lyrics. When Joseph Papp moved the show to Broadway the following year, in a new streamlined production directed by Tom O’Horgan, the authenticity factor reportedly went up, but the show’s mainstream success left some feeling like their movement had been co-opted. 

When Phyre Hawkins’ Dionne struts out in flower-child garb singing “Aquarius,” the musical’s rousing opening number and epoch-defining theme song, only the most stubborn could resist the sultry call to change. The show continues its star-shine seduction in the form of a revue, with actors dancing in the aisles and occasionally jumping into the laps of audience members, a few of whom looked like they’ve been waiting a long time for just this kind of impromptu love-in.
 
This national tour production has fielded a strong ensemble, and the joyful camaraderie among cast members is infectious. The high spirits never flag (thanks in large part to Karole Armitage’s breathless choreography) and similar to “The Donkey Show,” Paulus’ disco adaptation of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” there’s a feeling that any minute a full-blown rave might break out.   

Steel Burkhardt, who plays Berger, the tribe’s free-spirited Peter Pan, develops a chummy rapport with the audience the moment he drops his pants and shows off his fringe loincloth.  His performance captures the sweet, reckless, immature idealism of a generation that wants its pleasure without having to pay.
  
As Claude, the young man from Flushing, Queens, who pretends he hails from Manchester, England, Paris Remillard communicates the conflicted longing of someone who wishes he could relinquish his banal past.  Yet unlike his fellow hippies, he balks when it comes time to burn his draft card.  Responsibility may be a trap, but the alternative seems just as much a dead end to a kid whose head is a battleground between his parents’ carping voices and the siren sounds of rock 'n' roll. 

Paulus subtly corrects some of the troubling sexual politics of the show. Caren Lyn Tackett’s Sheila and Kacie Sheik’s Jeanie are more than pining love objects, and Matt DeAngelis’ Woof isn’t just an omnisexual fool for Mick Jagger but an affectionate presence.

The emotional resonance of this production is no doubt intensified by the context of our own wartime situation. The U.S. may no longer have a draft, but many young men and women confronting a job market with little breathing room for newcomers have no choice but to enlist. The show encourages us to hang out with its characters, to laugh at their rambunctious energy and to sympathize with their vulnerabilities. Tensions in the tribe break out, but the real terror is the sledgehammer of adult reality that’s waiting to descend. 

The music had me floating on a cloud of euphoria (even though the amplification was often overpowering), but heartbreak was palpable throughout. This revival redeems “Hair” not in a superficial tie-dye fashion but in a manner that connects us to what inspired an era to reinvent itself.

--Charles McNulty

twitter.com/charlesmcnulty

 "Hair," Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd, Los Angeles. 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays.  Ends Jan. 23. $25-$90. (800) 982-2787 or www.BroadwayLA.org. Running time: 2 hours, 25 minutes.

Photos: Top: "Hair" national tour company. Bottom: Lawrence Stallings, Steel Burkhardt and Matt DeAngelis. Credit: Joan Marcus